nVidia freeze on GeForce 5500

Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours later (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and the beta nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just released (like 2 days ago, if that).

Thanks
Rich

Rich--

I haven't used that particular card. But in talking with people who test
and tech support a lot of higher end GeForce cards in getting the best
driver for my own, the information is that for many of these cards, there
are several driver choices. For mine, there are about five right now
although that could have changed in the last week (as you know changes
happen rapidly with these drivers and Vista). I was given a recommendation
to use a driver that wasn't the newest. I've since tried every driver
available on Vista including the newest beta driver, and they have all been
fine. But some of these drivers "freeze/lockup" and others don't. You
might want to give the tech support number for whomever makes your card a
call--they are often 24 hours X 7 days and just excellent. Many of them test
these cards with some of the newest machines and they also have collected
data on which drivers for your particular card have ben reported as
problemmatic.

There also are the Nvidia forums and the excellent gamer and hardware site
forums as well.

Good luck,

Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with the
lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo head
in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working, you'd
be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers
and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:

This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war don't
it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in it
and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.

Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006 New
York Times

IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon
talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished
his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan
in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who
isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality.
It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what the
truth is.

The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2
percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief
who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in a
war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.

But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's "unity
government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation "in
the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared him
"the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The
Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security adviser,
Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on" in
his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
impervious to facts.

In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the right
guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki
would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi
and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed
this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
Sadr's existence.

In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell wrote
of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language
of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush,
the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one
that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for
his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who
wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two
words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into
what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were
fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or
not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
English as we once knew it.

It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public
alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
"abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat itself).

In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to such
regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and
post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word
"war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label
what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
Olsen twins.

I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is
the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth and
fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to
further his partisan political ends.

But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the
real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to
gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever
the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan
did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb,
the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress.
Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to get
them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.

Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground
is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be made
by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.

The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he
is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American
voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did
on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House unless
the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the
only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission
of changing course would be accomplished.

Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around
Thanksgiving.

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.



"Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in message
news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours later
(12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and the beta
nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just released
(like 2 days ago, if that).

Thanks
Rich

Haha, your political commentary is longer than your help. No, I'm not even
about to read it. Try making it a little shorter Chad.

"If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working, you'd
be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you"

Very good, I agree Typical American sheep. Oh! I just got shept!

--
/* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* Robert Firth *
* Windows Vista x86 RTM *
* http://www.WinVistaInfo.org *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */

"MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
<mvpendorsementsforswag.net> wrote in message
news:O3kIh10FHHA.3468@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> Rich--
>
> I haven't used that particular card. But in talking with people who test
> and tech support a lot of higher end GeForce cards in getting the best
> driver for my own, the information is that for many of these cards, there
> are several driver choices. For mine, there are about five right now
> although that could have changed in the last week (as you know changes
> happen rapidly with these drivers and Vista). I was given a
> recommendation to use a driver that wasn't the newest. I've since tried
> every driver available on Vista including the newest beta driver, and they
> have all been fine. But some of these drivers "freeze/lockup" and others
> don't. You might want to give the tech support number for whomever makes
> your card a call--they are often 24 hours X 7 days and just excellent.
> Many of them test these cards with some of the newest machines and they
> also have collected data on which drivers for your particular card have
> ben reported as problemmatic.
>
> There also are the Nvidia forums and the excellent gamer and hardware site
> forums as well.
>
> Good luck,
>
> Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with the
> lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo head
> in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working,
> you'd
> be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
> that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
> America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and grandmothers
> and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:
>
> This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war
> don't
> it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in it
> and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.
>
> Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006
> New
> York Times
>
> IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
> what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
> instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard
> Nixon
> talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate
> demolished
> his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to
> Jordan
> in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who
> isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from
> reality.
> It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what
> the
> truth is.
>
> The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
> responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
> Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
> William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq, adding
> that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
> state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only
> 2
> percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
> Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in
> chief
> who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants in
> a
> war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
>
> But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's
> "unity
> government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
> Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation
> "in
> the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
> al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared
> him
> "the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after The
> Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security
> adviser,
> Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on"
> in
> his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
> government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
> impervious to facts.
>
> In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the
> right
> guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
> anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr.
> Maliki
> would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad
> Allawi
> and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
> official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
> all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain
> proposed
> this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
> Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
> Sadr's existence.
>
> In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell
> wrote
> of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new
> language
> of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr.
> Bush,
> the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
> more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
> meaning altogether.
>
> When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission is
> complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone
> one
> that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes
> for
> his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
> prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who
> wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
> hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
> increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
> teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about
> two
> words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."
>
> When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
> about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
> instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
> showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had
> on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago
> into
> what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we
> were
> fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly
> or
> not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
> English as we once knew it.
>
> It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the
> public
> alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
> "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
> torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
> accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
> reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat
> itself).
>
> In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
> Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to
> such
> regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq
> and
> post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the
> word
> "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
> waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label
> what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
> Olsen twins.
>
> I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or
> is
> the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
> periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
> believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth
> and
> fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
> the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
> midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to
> further his partisan political ends.
>
> But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from
> the
> real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything
> to
> gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
> clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
> conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
> stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory.
> Whatever
> the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
> refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
> L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald
> Reagan
> did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb,
> the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
> president at a White House reception for newly elected members of
> Congress.
> Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to
> get
> them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
> subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
>
> Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
> Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
> accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the
> ground
> is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
> Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
> embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
> Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be
> made
> by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
> job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
> decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
>
> The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that
> he
> is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home.
> American
> voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did
> on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House
> unless
> the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that
> the
> only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission
> of changing course would be accomplished.
>
> Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
> intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
> Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
> longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
> finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
> troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
> killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24,
> around
> Thanksgiving.
>
> Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
> Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.
>
>
>
> "Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in message
> news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
> Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours later
> (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
> builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and the
> beta nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just
> released (like 2 days ago, if that).
>
> Thanks
> Rich

Sad that you can't read what isn't my political commentary which was a short
paragraph of intro but arguably one of the best essayists in American
journalism and you should learn to.

I made it clear that I reprinted an article from Sunday's NY Times by Frank
Rich who is well known but maybe not to that many IT enthusiasts who was the
NY Times theater critic from 1980 to 1994 and is now writing commentary in
the NY Times' Op Ed page. He's written a best selling book recently
http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Story.../dp/159420098X

I put his article in here because it's a clear sighted analysis of the chaos
and unnecessary deaths mounting in Iraq not to mention the incredible waste
of money. You'd do well to read it and learn to read Frank Rich and the
NYT.




"Robert Firth" <webmaster@winvistainfo.org> wrote in message
news:upg5tO1FHHA.1248@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Haha, your political commentary is longer than your help. No, I'm not even
> about to read it. Try making it a little shorter Chad.
>
> "If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working, you'd
> be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you"
>
> Very good, I agree Typical American sheep. Oh! I just got shept!
>
> --
> /* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> * Robert Firth *
> * Windows Vista x86 RTM *
> * http://www.WinVistaInfo.org *
> * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * */
>
> "MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
> <mvpendorsementsforswag.net> wrote in message
> news:O3kIh10FHHA.3468@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>> Rich--
>>
>> I haven't used that particular card. But in talking with people who test
>> and tech support a lot of higher end GeForce cards in getting the best
>> driver for my own, the information is that for many of these cards, there
>> are several driver choices. For mine, there are about five right now
>> although that could have changed in the last week (as you know changes
>> happen rapidly with these drivers and Vista). I was given a
>> recommendation to use a driver that wasn't the newest. I've since tried
>> every driver available on Vista including the newest beta driver, and
>> they have all been fine. But some of these drivers "freeze/lockup" and
>> others don't. You might want to give the tech support number for
>> whomever makes your card a call--they are often 24 hours X 7 days and
>> just excellent. Many of them test these cards with some of the newest
>> machines and they also have collected data on which drivers for your
>> particular card have ben reported as problemmatic.
>>
>> There also are the Nvidia forums and the excellent gamer and hardware
>> site forums as well.
>>
>> Good luck,
>>
>> Wake up America. You have a sociopathic, psychotic moron playing with
>> the
>> lives of thousands of your fellow Americans. Whatcha gonna do--put yo
>> head
>> in the sand? If it was your Vista booting, or your One Care working,
>> you'd
>> be expending a helluva lot more effort wouldn't you--come on--you know
>> that's right unless you're from predominantly small town ethnic miinority
>> America that has their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, and
>> grandmothers
>> and grandfathers actually being redeployed at stake:
>>
>> This is how it is. Typical American sheep: Uh Uh Uh isn't civil war
>> don't
>> it have to have Lincoln and Grant and cannons and a Confederate flag in
>> it
>> and like uniforms? Ah gotta go shoppin' for some bling and a duo core.
>>
>> Frank Rich Has He Started Talking to the Walls? Sunday December 3, 2006
>> New
>> York Times
>>
>> IT turns out we've been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand
>> what's going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting
>> instead is "The Final Days," the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard
>> Nixon
>> talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate
>> demolished
>> his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to
>> Jordan
>> in recent weeks, we've witnessed the troubling behavior of a president
>> who
>> isn't merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from
>> reality.
>> It's not that he can't handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn't know what
>> the
>> truth is.
>>
>> The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily
>> responsible for the country's spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr.
>> Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen.
>> William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda "extremely disorganized" in Iraq,
>> adding
>> that "I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the
>> state level." Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only
>> 2
>> percent to 3 percent of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim
>> Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in
>> chief
>> who can't even identify some 97 percent to 98 percent of the combatants
>> in a
>> war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II.
>>
>> But that's not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraq's
>> "unity
>> government" though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In
>> Henry Kissinger's accurate recent formulation, Iraq is not even a nation
>> "in
>> the historic sense.") After that pseudo-government's prime minister, Nuri
>> al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman, the president nonetheless declared
>> him
>> "the right guy for Iraq" the morning after. This came only a day after
>> The
>> Times's revelation of a secret memo by Mr. Bush's national security
>> adviser,
>> Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either "ignorant of what is going on"
>> in
>> his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a
>> government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is
>> impervious to facts.
>>
>> In truth the president is so out of it he wasn't even meeting with the
>> right
>> guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the
>> anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr.
>> Maliki
>> would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad
>> Allawi
>> and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadr's militia is far more powerful than the
>> official Iraqi army that we've been helping to "stand up" at hideous cost
>> all these years. If we're not going to take him out, as John McCain
>> proposed
>> this month, we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr.
>> Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr.
>> Sadr's existence.
>>
>> In his classic study, "The Great War and Modern Memory," Paul Fussell
>> wrote
>> of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new
>> language
>> of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr.
>> Bush,
>> the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the
>> more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its
>> meaning altogether.
>>
>> When the president persists in talking about staying until "the mission
>> is
>> complete" even though there is no definable military mission, let alone
>> one
>> that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes
>> for
>> his talk of "victory," another concept robbed of any definition when the
>> prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man
>> who
>> wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest
>> hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the
>> increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly
>> teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about
>> two
>> words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."
>>
>> When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war
>> about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly
>> instructive - but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble
>> showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has
>> had
>> on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago
>> into
>> what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we
>> were
>> fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly
>> or
>> not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from
>> English as we once knew it.
>>
>> It's been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the
>> public
>> alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the
>> "abuses" at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called
>> torture. And that the "manipulation" of prewar intelligence might be more
>> accurately called lying. Next up is "pullback," the Iraq Study Group's
>> reported euphemism to stave off the word "retreat" (if not retreat
>> itself).
>>
>> In the case of "civil war," it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt
>> Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to
>> such
>> regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq
>> and
>> post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the
>> word
>> "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of
>> waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to
>> label
>> what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the
>> Olsen twins.
>>
>> I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or
>> is
>> the sum of his "Bushisms" or is, as feverish Internet speculation
>> periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still don't. But I have
>> believed he is a cynic - that he could always distinguish between truth
>> and
>> fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. That's why, when
>> the president said that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq before the
>> midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie
>> to
>> further his partisan political ends.
>>
>> But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from
>> the
>> real world than ever. That's scary. Neither he nor his party has anything
>> to
>> gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush
>> clings to his delusions with a near-rage - watch him seethe in his press
>> conference with Mr. Maliki - that can't be explained away by sheer
>> stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory.
>> Whatever
>> the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when
>> refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless
>> L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald
>> Reagan
>> did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim
>> Webb,
>> the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the
>> president at a White House reception for newly elected members of
>> Congress.
>> Mr. Bush asked "How's your boy?" But when Mr. Webb replied, "I'd like to
>> get
>> them out of Iraq," the president refused to so much as acknowledge the
>> subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up.
>>
>> Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was
>> Vietnam on speed, a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are
>> accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the
>> ground
>> is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for
>> Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day - special envoy,
>> embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria,
>> Holbrooke, international conference, NATO - urgent decisions have to be
>> made
>> by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal
>> job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Decider's
>> decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already.
>>
>> The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that
>> he
>> is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home.
>> American
>> voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they
>> did
>> on Nov. 7, but apparently elections don't register at the White House
>> unless
>> the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that
>> the
>> only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the
>> mission
>> of changing course would be accomplished.
>>
>> Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of
>> intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report - uncovered by Thomas
>> Ricks of The Washington Post - concluding that American troops "are no
>> longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar." That
>> finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American
>> troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been
>> killed there since Labor Day, including five marines, ages 19 to 24,
>> around
>> Thanksgiving.
>>
>> Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in
>> Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.
>>
>>
>>
>> "Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in message
>> news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
>> Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours later
>> (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
>> builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and the
>> beta nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just
>> released (like 2 days ago, if that).
>>
>> Thanks
>> Rich
>

That's a pretty old card, not sure nVidia is going to support it with
final-release drivers.

--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User] rgharper@gmail.com
* NEW! Catch my blog ... http://msmvps.com/blogs/rgharper/
* PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
* The Website - http://rgharper.mvps.org/
* HELP us help YOU ... http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm


"Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in message
news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours later
(12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and the beta
nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just released
(like 2 days ago, if that).

Thanks
Rich

Well, they've got a beta driver that covers it (or they did a week ago, haven't
checked since then, I've been out of town). It's funny, this one was specifically
for testing with Vista

Rich

> That's a pretty old card, not sure nVidia is going to support it with
> final-release drivers.
>
> "Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in
> message
> news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
> Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours
> later
> (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
> builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and
> the beta
> nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just
> released
> (like 2 days ago, if that).
> Thanks
> Rich

thanks - I'll look into that. I've debated replacing the card, but if I
did that, I'd want to get a PCI-E card. If I did that, I'd have to replace
the motherboard (I got one with AGP to accomodate the free video card!).
And if I did that, well a core duo sure would be tempting. But this Sempron
3100+ is actually pretty fast, and since I don't really do any gaming, it's
fine for most of my purposes. So I'll try to get it to work.

Rich


MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance" mvpendorsementsforswag.net,
(aka Chad? wrote:

> Rich--
>
> I haven't used that particular card. But in talking with people who
> test and tech support a lot of higher end GeForce cards in getting the
> best driver for my own, the information is that for many of these
> cards, there are several driver choices. For mine, there are about
> five right now although that could have changed in the last week (as
> you know changes happen rapidly with these drivers and Vista). I was
> given a recommendation to use a driver that wasn't the newest. I've
> since tried every driver available on Vista including the newest beta
> driver, and they have all been fine. But some of these drivers
> "freeze/lockup" and others don't. You might want to give the tech
> support number for whomever makes your card a call--they are often 24
> hours X 7 days and just excellent. Many of them test these cards with
> some of the newest machines and they also have collected data on which
> drivers for your particular card have ben reported as problemmatic.
>
> There also are the Nvidia forums and the excellent gamer and hardware
> site forums as well.
>
> Good luck,
>
>
> "Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in
> message
> news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
> Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours
> later
> (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
> builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and
> the beta
> nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just
> released
> (like 2 days ago, if that).
> Thanks
> Rich

Yes Rich --a huge percentage of people are in that position. Some on older
PCs don't have the slot for some of the newer higher end cards, some need
new PSUs for sure when they upgrade their cards and you have to be careful
because so many of the OEM named partners although not all have proprietary
wiring systems and don't even sell the PSU upgrades and then you have to go
to people like PC Power and Cooling who are very reliable and good at what
they do www.pcpowercooling.com/products/ (not all are sold in large stores
like Fry's even the ones a particular company makes and buying can be
tricky). As to mobos needed for cards, of course it depends on the cards.
I was told that only certain of the Nvidia newest cards like the 7950 are
mobo specific and not even some of the later cards so if a forum doesn't
answer it for you like Dell Hardware which is very good or Nvidia or
countless other excellent hardware forums, you can always call the Tech
Support number for the card that is a gleam in your eye.

But with this Vista wave and duo core etc. wave now, many are in the
position of how much do you upgrade that old computer including RAM which
costs a lot more for high quality RAM on older boxes or do you take that
money and buy or build which is more fun a new pc?

It is obvious that if anyone is willing to wait a few months, because of the
Vista momentum dove tailing with all the new processors and hardware, there
will be more variety and more deals than there are at this moment. I know
we are in the Christmas shopping season but still I belive the best choices
are gonig to be in the early months of 2007 and then throughout 2007 if you
are in the market for new pcs in a small business or home context or a
context that is both.

You can get that box to work extremely well and you will. I can't emphasize
enough between the forums like Nvidia or the Tom's Hdw type or the Dell or
some of the excellent gamer forums and just calling tech support for the
maker of some of the NVIDIA cards, you can get excellent info. This is not
like the awful state of tech support for software which is not near as good
on the phone as you're going to get from a lot of the people who help in
these groups. The Nvidia card makers have dedicated pc builders and gamers
and graphics mavens who do tech support. They know the drivers that are
coming out for the cards in this challenging period as well as anyone and
they do a great job.

Also be sure to check out www.extremetech.com who always do a great job with
forums and articles and are strong in MSFT products, hardware, Apple, and
Linux. These are the guys from PC Magazines lab and the guys who work with
Jim Louderback who used to be at Tech TV and now is Editor at PC Mag. It's
a very helpful site.

CH

"Rich Milburn" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in message
news:4bf871662680e8c8e593f02cb16e@news.microsoft.c om...
>
> thanks - I'll look into that. I've debated replacing the card, but if I
> did that, I'd want to get a PCI-E card. If I did that, I'd have to
> replace the motherboard (I got one with AGP to accomodate the free video
> card!). And if I did that, well a core duo sure would be tempting. But
> this Sempron 3100+ is actually pretty fast, and since I don't really do
> any gaming, it's fine for most of my purposes. So I'll try to get it to
> work.
> Rich
>
>
> MSFT Trades Swag to MVPs for Support, Defense, and Blind Allegiance"
> mvpendorsementsforswag.net, (aka Chad? wrote:
>
>> Rich--
>>
>> I haven't used that particular card. But in talking with people who
>> test and tech support a lot of higher end GeForce cards in getting the
>> best driver for my own, the information is that for many of these
>> cards, there are several driver choices. For mine, there are about
>> five right now although that could have changed in the last week (as
>> you know changes happen rapidly with these drivers and Vista). I was
>> given a recommendation to use a driver that wasn't the newest. I've
>> since tried every driver available on Vista including the newest beta
>> driver, and they have all been fine. But some of these drivers
>> "freeze/lockup" and others don't. You might want to give the tech
>> support number for whomever makes your card a call--they are often 24
>> hours X 7 days and just excellent. Many of them test these cards with
>> some of the newest machines and they also have collected data on which
>> drivers for your particular card have ben reported as problemmatic.
>>
>> There also are the Nvidia forums and the excellent gamer and hardware
>> site forums as well.
>>
>> Good luck,
>>
>>
>> "Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in
>> message
>> news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
>> Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours
>> later
>> (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
>> builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and
>> the beta
>> nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just
>> released
>> (like 2 days ago, if that).
>> Thanks
>> Rich
>
>

Rich and some people might be interested in reading this from Dell's new
blog which has some very good info overall:

The 590 SLI Chipset from NVIDIA's Perspective
http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/a...2/04/3961.aspx

Published Monday, December 04, 2006 10:45 AM
by Bryan Del Rizzo, NVIDIA MCP Business Group
Filed Under: Products, Technology, Consumer/ Small Business, Customer
Experience, Gaming



The 590 SLI Chipset from NVIDIA's Perspective Given the ongoing concern
about Dell's implementation of the 590 SLI chipset on the XPS 700, I wanted
to take a few minutes to clarify some things from NVIDIA's perspective.

For AMD platforms, the nForce 590 SLI SPP (what was commonly known as the
"northbridge"), supports a single x16 PCIe connection as well as 2 x1
connections. All products that are branded nForce 590 SLI, include both an
nForce SPP and nForce MCP (this two chip solution is commonly referred to as
a "chipset"). Because this is a dual X16 PCIe platform, it has to be paired
with a media and communications processor (MCP), or what is commonly
referred to as a "southbridge." The MCP chip used in this solution is called
the nForce 590 SLI MCP. The nForce 590 SLI MCP incorporates the second x16
PCIe as well as 4 x1 connections.

Because AMD incorporates a memory controller into its CPUs, we can also
utilize the nForce 590 SLI MCP as an alternative single chip solution that
provides a dual x8 functionality for more mainstream PCs. For these
specifics uses, the nForce 590 SLI MCP is used but is branded to consumers
under the nForce 570 SLI name. This is necessary so that consumers can
distinguish between the nForce 590 SLI solution which is dual x16, and the
nForce 570 SLI solution which is dual x8.

For Intel, we have a nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition SPP that also incorporates
a memory controller for Intel CPUs. This SPP is paired with the nForce 590
SLI MCP, which is the same thing as the nForce 570 SLI MCP. Some programs,
including CPU-Z, report the "southbridge" as nForce 570 SLI MCP. This is
fine. However, you need to distinguish between what NVIDIA brands as the
nForce 590 SLI solution vs. the individual chips which are used on the
motherboard.

For the XPS 700 and 710, Dell uses the nForce 590 SLI SPP (for Intel)
"northbridge" and the correct southbridge, which in this case, is the nForce
590 SLI MCP, also known as the nForce 570 SLI MCP. Dell's implementation is
the one represented in the first two pages of this PDF on our site that some
of you referenced in the comment thread to Lionel's earlier post on this
topic.

CH


"Rich Milburn" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in message
news:4bf871662680d8c8e59240b6223e@news.microsoft.c om...
> Well, they've got a beta driver that covers it (or they did a week ago,
> haven't checked since then, I've been out of town). It's funny, this one
> was specifically for testing with Vista
>
> Rich
>
>> That's a pretty old card, not sure nVidia is going to support it with
>> final-release drivers.
>>
>> "Rich Milburn [MVP]" <richdotmilburn@applebeesdot.com> wrote in
>> message
>> news:CDE31B3D-ADCE-457A-ADE2-32E4CF93466C@microsoft.com...
>> Hey has anyone used a GeForce 5500 and seen it freeze up, and hours
>> later
>> (12-24) it "recovers?" Mine seems to lock up, it's done so on several
>> builds and RTM, and 32 or 64 bit. I've used the in-box drivers and
>> the beta
>> nVidia drivers, but I haven't tried the ones that I think they just
>> released
>> (like 2 days ago, if that).
>> Thanks
>> Rich
>
>

I am currently using the FX5500 (which is advertised as being "Vista
ready") with Vista RC2 Build 5744, and it seems to be working fine for
me. I first installed it in an XP Pro SP2 environment, then updated the
drivers (through Device Manager) to version 9.1.47, dated 8/11/2006 (I
believe the drivers on the CD were at least 4 months older than that).
Then, I upgraded the XP Pro SP2 to Vista RC2 Build 5744, where I have,
AFAICT, the full Aero glass, and (at least, so far) no problems with it.

---------------------

Richard G. Harper wrote:
> That's a pretty old card, not sure nVidia is going to support it with
> final-release drivers.
>