Thursday, April 26, 2007

I always keep my computer up to date with the latest software, patches, drivers, etc. On Patch Tuesday I get the latest upgrades and install them. There were some new video drivers for my ATI card this week. I was happy to install them because the old ones are at least a year old. But I noticed last night that the video on the laptop LCD display was kind of blurry. I investigated and found that although the display is physically 1400 x 1050, the video was set to 1280x1024. Not only that, but there was no longer the option to set it to the correct resolution. It was obvious what was wrong, but it was not obvious how to fix it. I searched around and couldn't find anything that discussed this particular problem. Eventually I decided that I'd just restore to the save point of a day or two ago. After all, that is what the save points are for, right? In theory, anyway. I tried to do the restore, but each time, after it rebooted the computer several times, it popped up a window telling me that it couldn't restore to the save point and that it just left the machine alone. (At least it only wasted my time.) What is the point of saving periodically if you can't actually use the save? After some more poking around, I finally figured out that I could roll back the device driver update from the device properties. That worked. This is ridiculous, though.

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