Or: How to prevent spending two days pulling your hair out.
The Beginning:
Its been a busy weekend at the lab, weve got some new 815 and KT133 boards to review, and with the release of Windows Me we decided to run our benchmarks in this spanking new OS. The 815s pulled it off without a hitch as is to be expected. Lets face facts WinTel = OS/Chipset compatibility. Next came the KT133 boards. Simple, right? heh So, we install the OS, discover that the 3DProphetII GTS 64 is running sluggishly (2200 in 3Dmark 2000), run H-Odas WCPUID and see that we have NO AGP support. This came as a bit of a shock to us since in 98SE there is 2x support native without having to run VIAs AGP driver.
Welcome to Hell:
Off to VIAs website we go. We downloaded the AGP 403 patch and discovered there is a WinMe driver directory. Cool, were back on the road. Just run the setup, select “install in turbo mode”, and reboot. No problem, right? Wrong, Major crash. So we boot to safe mode and uninstall the driver. Windows still wont boot, so back to safe mode. We set the video driver back to standard PCI VGA and were able to get back into Windows. We reload the Detonator 3 (618) NVIDIA drivers and all is back as it was at the beginning, pretty Windows but no AGP support. Maybe we should install in standard mode, Trevor says. OK, sounds good. CRASH!! The hair pulling commences. Bear in mind Win98SE and Win2K do not have this problem, but we just finished two 815 reviews in WinMe so benchmarking the VIA boards in any other OS was not an option and damn if we were going to redo the other reviews. A little light went on in my head.
The Solution:
We had recently been playing with TweakUI and other shell modifiers. To install TweakUI you go to the directory you installed it to, right-click on the .inf file, and tell it to INSTALL, thus the little light in my head. Just to be safe we scraped the hard drive clean and reinstalled WinMe. After installation we installed the VIA AGP driver by way right-clicking on the .inf file in the WinMe driver directory. Everyone held their breath while the machine rebooted. Success!! After rebooting we went back to WCPUID and verified the existence of AGP support. All was once again well with the world. Now to just finish these benchmarks, let the press editor beat the reviews up a bit, and you, the readers, will soon be seeing the fruits of this weekends toils.