On Display Drivers

Before I launched into finally trying to solve the DVD Decoder issue, I wanted to clear up an annoying message that appeared whenever I rebooted the machine. It was a message indicating the Windows Defender failed to start. This started happening around the time I installed McAfee, and I believe that McAfee disabled the Windows Defender service, but failed to disable its Notification Area icon. (Or perhaps I did it. I can't remember.) There was nothing in the Startup folder on the Start menu that started this icon's program, so I ran a program called msconfig, found the Windows Defender program and disabled it. Windows Defender is a Spyware detection program and McAfee already does that, so there's no sense in having two of these running.

After I did this, I opened the ATI Catalyst Control Center and selected, Check For Driver Updates. I had noticed earlier in the week that there looked like there were some recent updates for the graphics chip, and I was hoping that perhaps there might be a DVD Decoder hiding in there was well. Clicking on Check For Driver Updates took me to the ATI website where I had to figure out where they had hidden the display drivers for my system. First I had to tell it that I was running 64-bit Vista, then I had to tell it that I my product line was Integrated/Motherboard, and then I could select Radeon HD 3200. (The Integrated/Motherboard thing really confused me. I think that during the initial installation of software I tried to upgrade the drivers and gave up when I couldn't find Radeon HD 3200 in the Radeon product line.) Once I got to the right download page, I discovered that not only did they have updated display drivers, but they had an update to the south bridge chip set too. Plus they had a download for something called HydraVision. (Much Excitement!)

So, I downloaded and installed everything. The installation of the south bridge drivers caused a hiccup in the Gyration USB transmitter, but unplugging it and plugging it back in fixed that. Then I tried playing a DVD using SageTV and, sadly, got the same results. HyrdaVision looks like something that lets you divide the screen into multiple display regions. This is something more than just a new way to create windows, for it looks like you can have multiple desktops and can switch quickly between each of them. Interesting, but not very helpful, so I disabled it.

So, I'm back to looking for a DVD Decoder. It looks like Nvidia supplies one, so I was hoping that ATI did as well.