Blogging Workstation Upgrade Phase 1: Replaced
the video card and added half a Gigabyte of memory.
More photos in the Operation Gadget Photo Gallery.
[ Photo: Dave Aiello ]

I guess this is upgrade week on Operation Gadget.

I'm supposed to get the second 17-inch flat panel display for my Blogging Workstation on Monday. Yesterday, I received the components I need to install inside my PC's case. They are:

• an ATI Radeon 7000 Multi-Display Edition Video Card, and
• 512 Megabytes of 333 DDR-PC2700 memory to bring the machine up to 1 Gigabyte of RAM.

I decided to install these pieces today so that I didn't spend the entire day on Monday "underneath the hood".

The new video card and memory were easy to install, as you can see in the Blogging Workstation Upgrade- January 2005 photo album. The problem came later when I had to troubleshoot Windows 2000 video drivers because the PC kept crashing when a piece of software (like a Windows installer) tried to switch video modes.

I eventually got the Blogging Workstation stabilized again, but I had to uninstall the ATI video drivers and re-install them. If you ever do an ATI video card installation, I strongly recommend downloading the drivers you need for ATI's website and burning your own driver installation CD.

This also allows you to avoid the possibility of messing up the PC by installing an old version of a Microsoft subsystem like DirectX. I knew I was in trouble when I found out that I had to install that package.

Next week I'll finish the upgrade by connecting the second flat panel display and configuring the video driver and desktop management software.