[ale] Nvidia prepares to cut ties with some partners

[Reggie Euser]

A bit off-topic, but speaking of Nvidia...

Two days ago, I foolishly allowed the auto-updater on my office desktop 
machine attempt to install XP's "Service Pack 3". The machine vapor-locked, 
rebooted spontaneously, and barfed up the message that my Nvidia driver was 
wrong. Rebooting in "Safe" mode, I dutifully updated the driver and 
attempted to re-boot, only to get into a boot-crash-reboot loop. After a 
number of other futile attempts to salvage the machine, it finally quit 
booting at all - no access to BIOS, nothing. In despair, I walked away and 
took comfort from an old *nix box, faithfully humming in a corner...

By sheer coincidence, yesterday I had to kill time waiting for a meeting and 
wandered into a hole-in-the-wall computer repair shop. The guy running the 
place told me he'd had seven different customers' machines brought in in the 
last 2 days, all having crashed after the owners attempted the SP-3 install. 
He was just wiping their disks & reinstalling from scratch, a solution I was 
loathe to contemplate.

Later on, I had a hunch and swapped out my Nvidia-based card for an older 
Nvidia-based card cannibalized from a spare box. Huzzah! The machine 
rebooted normally. Apparently, SP-3 had somehow fried my video card. 
Googling later confirmed that others had suffered the same fate.

Moral of the story:  If you're required to use XP for whatever reason, be 
_very_ careful about the updates...and if you have a choice, run, don't walk 
to a *nix based desktop environment that almost never comes with an 
automatic fry-your-system feature...

------------------------------
Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 10:40:39 -0400
From: <krwatson at cc.gatech.edu>
Subject: [ale] Nvidia prepares to cut ties with some partners
To: <ale at ale.org>
Message-ID:
<B0A7F32E2E76B045BDAD924D1152BA0C44D7A4E3D1 at aeatlcamex16.campus.gtri.ext>


Nvidia prepares to cut ties with some partners
http://www.techspot.com/news/31498-nvidia-prepares-to-cut-ties-with-some-partners.html