Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I've finally worked out why I'm now getting Aero Glass on one of my Windows Vista test beds, my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. Its Nvidia Go5200 video card only has 32MB of on-board memory, so shouldn't meet the 128MB minimum video RAM requirement...

Surprisingly Nvidia has done something rather innovative with its latest Vista drivers, and the Go5200 now uses shared memory. Which means it can take a chunk of the tablet's 1GB of RAM, and bootstrap itself up into using Vista's high-end graphics modes.

A nifty hack.

The combination of Vista's search-based UI, Aero Glass, and the M400 Toshiba driver hack (and now the 2007 Office Beta 2 Technical Refresh) have given a nearly three year old laptop a new lease of life.

I still want a Core Duo Toshiba M400, though...

...as AMD purchases ATI.

It's an interesting fit with AMD's plans to build on the success of its Opteron chips and open up HyperTransport for the development of dedicated co-processors (including physics engines and Java machines). AMD needs the expertise of a motherboard and chipset manufacturer to get this project, code-named Terrazzo, working well, and to drive the development of 64-bit servers.

It'll also counteract the Intel push to own the home PC platform, with a strong media PC alternative to Viiv. ATI's a strong player in the Windows Media Centre space, so it should give AMD more traction with OEMs and other hardware manufacturers.

All in all good for the industry. But I'm not sure what it'll mean for Nvidia in the short term.

I've been a little frustrated with Nvidia recently. They regularly update the drivers for their desktop graphics cards, but tend to leave out the laptops - even when the're running the same hardware!

Time to let go of the frustration, as you can take your laptop to the video driver ball in new glad rags. While trying to get more up to date Vista drivers for my tablet, now that I'm running the latest post Beta 2 build, I came across LaptopVideo2Go.com, a site that produces modified .INF files for Nvidia's stock drivers, so they run on laptops. All you need to download are their modified installer descriptions, use them to replace the Nvidia description file, and run the installer...

A useful resource.

Just a pity that the modified .INF file for 88.61 for my tablet didn't support screen rotation. Ah well, back to the old versions.