When Video Cards Go Bad

george_v_reilly — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:50:00 GMT

I complained a week ago about my display driver going berserk. I blamed Windows Update, since it happened within hours of a pile of updates being installed. I upgraded to the latest beta NVidia drivers on Monday and it helped for a while, but by Wednesday, it was almost as bad again as it had been last Friday. It was infuriating and I was both entertaining and alarming my neighbors with my cursing.

Today was the last day of a very busy sprint for me and at last I had the time to dig into it. I opened up the case and took a look at both video cards—I have two dual-head cards connected to three monitors—and one of them had partially blown capacitors like those in the picture. I removed the bad card and did some graphics-intensive things for an hour, and the other card behaved flawlessly.

Oddly, until someone mentioned that it might be a hardware problem yesterday, it didn't occur to me, even though a video card blew in this machine last year. I came in one morning to find a black monitor, and when I pulled out that card, I found that some of the capacitors had popped right open with stuffing protruding.

On general principles, I had been meaning to repave this machine for a while. I've had it since December 2007 and it was still running the original installation of Vista. I booted from a DVD, reformatted my C: drive, and installed Windows 7 x64 RC1.

I finally have a 64-bit OS as my primary Windows desktop, so I'll actually be using the Win64 build of Vim that I maintain. My first impressions of Windows 7 on this machine are very favorable, but there's plenty more that I need to install before the machine has everything that I need.

Windows 7 x64 running in Mac VirtualBox 2.2.2

george_v_reilly — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:03:00 GMT

I ported Vim to Win64 but I don't have a convenient Win64 system to test it on.

I decided to install the Win64 build of the Windows 7 RC on VirtualBox, which has supported 64-bit guest operating systems since version 2.0.

It worked without problems on my MacBook Pro. I used VirtualBox's Virtual Media Manager to mount the Windows 7 ISO and installed from that. See also the handy guide. (Why does Windows 7 offer a choice of upgrading from a previous version of Windows on a virgin disk?) After completing the installation of the operating system, I installed the Guest Additions for mouse pointer integration and other goodies.

As always with VirtualBox VMs on my MacBook, I had to fix the Network settings to work over WiFi. When the VM is turned off, go to Settings, choose the Network tab. Change “Attached to” from “NAT” to “Bridged Adapter” and “Name” from “en0: Ethernet” to “en1: AirPort”. Tip: to get a right-click without a mouse, place two fingers on the trackpad and click the trackpad button, or Shift+F10.

I tried installing the Win64 build of Win 7 on my Win32 Vista desktop box at work. The host system bluescreened within seconds of starting the installer! I filed ticket 3963.

I had inadvertently installed the Win32 build first on my work system. That worked fine. It also seemed to have snappy disk I/O. When I unzipped the Win64 Vim binaries (not having realized yet that I had the Win32 Win 7), it was slower than unzipping in the host operating system, but not unreasonably so. On my MacBook, the details pane from the Win 7 zip extractor said that it was running at a mere 260KB per second, which is pitiful. It certainly wasn't that slow when installing the OS onto the virtual disk.

George V. Reilly's Technical Blog : Win7

When Video Cards Go Bad

Windows 7 x64 running in Mac VirtualBox 2.2.2