When I got my laptop, it came with Vista.  Vista and I have issues.  A lot of issues, so we wiped it and installed (legitmately) XP.  Now, I’ve known for some time that some of the drivers weren’t right, but it didn’t affect what I was doing, so I didn’t worry about it.

Not so anymore.

I spent THREE hours updating my videocard drivers.  And would you like to know why?  Because ATI doesn’t support my card for XP.  At all.  Except (thanks to one of the techie forums) at some point Intel made them do it for, I think, Compaq.  So the driver does exist for XP, except I had to download a driver updater that won’t work on my machine, let it try to work, and then go in and install the driver manually from the files the unsuccessful updater installed on my hard-drive.

That is what I did on Saturday night.  For HOURS.  Because like a fool I went to the manufacturer’s site first…  Sigh.

So it runs now, but really, really, really, “get killed in the face before you can say hello” slowly.

In all likelihood I’ll spend tonight figuring out what other drivers need updating, uninstalling a bunch of superfluous crap, and contemplating bumping up my RAM.

I’m also seriously entertaining thoughts of moving over to Linux, because I can’t afford a Mac.  The Roomie*  says according to the forums CoH/CoV will run on it with only occasional glitches.  I don’t know.  We’ll see how this little experiment goes.  Or maybe I’ll just install it on the desktop.

*The Roomie is a Linux programmer.