Rob's Blog

Sorry, this one’s going to get a little geeky.

We rented a Blu-Ray last night in an attempt to have a nice Friday night in. Unfortunately the film (Be Kind Rewind) crashed the ATI video drivers on this computer. After a couple of attempts I decided to try upgrading the ATI drivers. I was a little concerned about doing this as when I last upgraded (just after buying the computer), the intallation failed meaning I couldn’t use Catalyst Control Center (CCC) (a control panel required to use the computer with our HD TV), and I got lots of error messages. I did fix it in the end, but it was a real pain.

Anyway, I ran the upgrade, and suprise surprise it failed mid installation. CCC doesn’t work, but that’s the least of the problems. Boot up takes absoltely ages, during which it pauseds on a black screen for many minutes (I actually thought it had crashed, and tried the various windows repairs, which also took ages). The drive doesn’t recognise Bl-Rays or DVDs, and crashes if I try to. Media Player doesn’t work, and MediaPortal only works for the first time each boot.

Luckily Spotify and the various on-demand TV sites work, so we’re still able to watch TV, but the computer is a real mess.

I’m going to have to try fixing the driver (it took quite some time last time), which I might try later.

If anyone is interested, we’re running Windows Vista 32-bit, and have an ATI Radeon 3870 HD graphics card. The drivers I tried to install were version 9.6. Install at your own risk!