Battling the Beast!

If you haven't struggled with a machine that's not from a "major" manufacturer; let's just say that its a "different" experience. I understood this going in, which is why, whenever I'm advising someone or doing a machine for a client, I almost universally use something from a major player, and not only that, but a machine from their corporate line that they sold in the tens if not hundreds of thousand units. The reasoning is very simple. The vast majority of these computers are sold to corporate clients who not only demand a high level of reliability, but support as well. What this means is that the drivers and software utilities are typically available 24/7 from the internet with little fuss and muss.

However, when dealing with smaller outfits (like the Clevos) of the computing world, this is quite often not the case. Relatively speaking they don't sell a lot of units and therefore, can't really rationalize the infrastructure it takes to provide top-notch support. This is further complicated by the fact that some of them (again, like Clevo) don't sell very much to the end user, but more to boutique OEMs such as VooDoo, Hypersonic, and Alienware which further muddies the waters. All that being said; lets just say that finding the correct hardware drivers for my son's potentially "new" computer was challenging.

To start with, Windows XPP left about 6 devices without drivers. Clevo's Europe site where I located the drivers was a little "bare-bones" to say the least, but never-the-less, I was able to grab enough drivers to clear up all but 2 of the infamous (!) marks, leaving only the webcam, and most frustratingly, the video adapter. There were 3 different zip files for video adapters, with no indication which to use, so I grabbed the latest (2005!)......3 different times at 25+ minutes each time! Repeatedly the zip expansion said that the file was "invalid", so I finally gave in and the tried each of the other files....multiple times....with the same results.

Today I finally decided to stop banging my head against that particular wall, and try different routes. A BitTorrent all-encompassing package ended up being a dead end. Then it was onto the ATI, the maker of the Radeon 9600 GPU, and their Catalyst driver package....no joy. Finally, it was on to the world of "Googled" driver results. As most of you are aware, this is a shadow world of the internet with all manner of "blind alleys", gimmicks and Malware, so I was understandably a little nervous. Ultimately, after quite a bit of searching I came across a site with a different version of the ATI Catalyst driver that looked promising.

So I started this load, and BOOM.....not what you think, it didn't crash or anything...it gave an error message referring to a MS Dotnet utility that wasn't loaded. This I'd seen before, in the ThinkPads which will not load their automated software updater without it. So, after a little rummaging around in my software archives in the desktop, I found it, put in on a flash drive, and loaded it up on the Beast; after which I reran the ATI loader, rebooted, and like magic, the screen came back as the high resolution (relatively speaking) 1440 x 900 that the correct video adapter driver would support on the screen!

After that, I corrected another issue that it had had when SP2 was loaded (unsuccessfully), which cleared up the IE problem which was making it not be able to download anything from M$. Then we moved on to catch up on Updates that wouldn't load previously and Security Essentials.

So, here we are, despite sketchy support, weird/non-working drivers, odd chipset (SiS!), it's got the basic load that it needs to move on and seems to be stable.....which leads to the dismantling and painting of the machine. I've spent a ridiculous number of hours on YouTube watching videos on painting (although its somethings I've done already, but hey, you can always learn) and spray paints by Rustoleum and Dupli-color. Next step now is to take Josh down to the auto parts store and have him look at colors to get his thoughts. Personally, I'm really leaning toward the Green/Blue "color shift" paint that you can get from Rustoleum, but its up to him to see what he likes, then it'll be on to dozens of screws and taking the Beast down!