a question for you computer engineers

The plot thickens: My wife informed me after I wrote this post that the scrolling issue described below appeared yesterday. This morning’s attempted blue screen of death startup was the first since yesterday’s boot, so it could very well be a result of the same problem. Also interesting: Will’s blog scrolls normally. All the other sites my wife visited (including this one) do not. Thank you to those of you who’ve responded.

A while back (like two or three years ago) I installed a Xtasy graphics card in my Dell desktop. It uses the ATI Radeon 9800 (I think) graphics accelerator. Periodically the driver would crash and we would see the blue screen of death.

Today we had one of those crashes but my usual hard reboot didn’t fix the problem. Having exhausted my reservoir of expertise, I called ATI and got this totally imperious jerk on the other end. Maybe he was having a bad day. Anyway he just about yelled at me for not having uninstalled the ATI graphics driver. I eventually did and restarted the computer, keeping him apprised of my progress.

As I was waiting for the computer to reboot, he hung up on me! I regret to confess that I used a nasty word to describe him right then.

The computer rebooted okay. But then I had trouble when I turned it off (the correct way) and turned it back on again. Eventually I got the thing to where it starts up and displays properly, but all the graphics acceleration is gone now. The most immediate sign of this is that scrolling is not smooth. The whole screen gets redrawn with every wheel turn or use of the scroll bar.

Out of the box, this machine scrolled smoothly. I was hoping when I disabled the graphics card that I would be at least back to where I was. The computer is usable, and the jumpy scrolling is really just an annoyance. But if any of you have ideas about getting me back to where I was, I’d love to hear them.