[no subject]

FUCK IT Let me go on record as saying that the ATI Radeon AIW 8500DV is NOT compatible with the ASUS A7A266 motherboard. Period. Want to prove me wrong? Be my guest...drop me a line and let me know just what kind of voodoo magic bullshit you had to perform to get those two pieces of shit working together... I today I'm running on a different power supply, and I decide to do some more fiddling. I got some cheap-o thermal paste from Rat Sham and cleaned all the old waxy strip crap off my CPU and applied the paste. I think it has made a difference in my CPU temp, but it's still kinda hard to tell. It's certainly not any worse. I decide to do some additional troubleshooting of my lock-up problems. I notice some dust crap on my DDR stick from the CPU fan, so I clean it thouroughly before sticking it back in. I tweak every possible combination of settings relating to RAM settings, with mandatory fuckin reboots in between. Still locks up. I turned the hardware acceleration (desktop properties, settings, advanced, troubleshooting, acceleration) all the way down and managed to perform my standard lock-up test (ie. loading this page in either Mozilla or IE) without a freeze. I thought it was a good start...but unfortunately that caused subsequent reboots to freeze before Windows would load. Nice. I tried every other hardware acceleration setting...everything other than FULL acceleration would freeze during windows boot. Real fuckin nice. I even tried moving my DDR stick to another slot. No go. All this on top of what I tried yesterday. I'm just fuckin convinced that these two LAME ASS pieces of hardware won't work together. Period. I like to think that I know what I'm doing when it comes to these kinds of [technical] schtuffs. I'd like to think that I'm pretty "up" on dealing with and configuring hardware. There's no fucking possible reason why I shouldn't be able to get this fucking card working in this fucking motherboard. It's absolutely fucking rediculous. So, in the event that it's not entirely obvious now, I'm a little pissed off about this whole situation. This kind of shit just shouldn't happen. I'm angry. Ug! I can't wait to build a new system...