Okay, so I’m trying to get that video card working tonight, and it continues to refuse to be cooperative. As I mentioned, last night I wiped out the nForce motherboard drivers, thinking that might help things. As long as I was going to need to put those back on, I thought I’d update my mobo to the latest BIOS version. At first even that was uncooperative—I started having the same problems with the Asus flash utility that I had the last time I tried it. Fortunately, the flash utility has a command line parameter you can use to force it to execute the EEPROM burn, thereby skirting the problem I was having. All right, so far, so good.

I got the latest nForce drivers installed, then tried installing the Forceware video drivers again. the result was still the same: Windows refused to boot up in normal mode. Far worse, however, was the message that came up when I rebooted back to safe mode. It was something to the effect of: “Due to hardware changes made since this version of Windows XP was installed, you must reactivate Windows XP within 3 days.” RAGE!

Well, as long as I was committed to calling Microsoft and begging them to let me use their product, I figured I’d go all-out and do a reformat/reinstall—at least that way I’d have thirty days, instead of just three. This also gives me a chance to clean up the system a bit, reorganize the hardware in the case for better cooling, and generally do one last tweak of the machine before I build the new box. So, it looks like I’m going to have a Saturday fit for a king…the king of nerds. I love it.

I did notice one very interesting (and pleasing) thing about this video card, though. While I couldn’t get nVidia’s drivers to work with my system, the standard catch-all Windows drivers allowed me to jack the resolution up to 1600×1200, which is where I usually run. So I set it there, just so my eyes wouldn’t bleed while I backed up some files to CD-R. During this time, I noticed that the text on my screen was significantly sharper on the GeForce than it had ever been on my Radeon 9800 Pro. The entire picture, in fact, was worlds better—on the stock Windows VGA driver!

In fact, ever since I got my new monitor I’ve actually been disappointed that its text quality was so poor. It seems, however, that the blame for that lies with either ATI’s video hardware or its drivers, I don’t know which. Either way, I suspect that 9800 Pro will be the last ATI product I buy for a while. To think of all the headaches (literally) I’ve suffered because of crappy text quality so far. I reeeeeally hope I can get this GeForce to work, because I don’t want to go back to that.

Anyway, I’ll keep you all posted.