Beware Your Choice of Drivers

I have a Dell 700m notebook computer. It's a pretty crappy computer for one reason: the mic input is busted. However, when I bought it two years ago, the price was right, and it is pretty small so good for travel.

I changed home offices. (I moved from the closet in the hall to the room in the garage.) When I first made the move, I didn't have time to move the desktop computer, so I used the 700m as my desktop.

I had a big ah hah moment: I had spent some time trying to get my desktop computer to be less noisy, and I failed miserably. With only my notebook computer hooked up, I noticed that it was desperately quiet. What a luxury.

I retired the desktop and now use the laptop for both travel and as a "desktop replacement." Alas, it means giving up my 21" Hitachi CRT, but that's OK because it was pretty crappy anyway. That monitor doesn't do VGA resolution (it came from an NCD X terminal), so it would only work as a second monitor. But it was too fuzzy to use as my primary monitor, so I stayed with the 17" flat panel that I was using as the primary on my desktop.

Yesterday I bought a Samsung 204T off Craig's List. I used this monitor at a client, and it blew me away. It is a very nice monitor, much better than the 204B that replaced it. The screen is much brighter, has a much better viewing angle, and has a far superior stand that lets me adjust the thing much more.

It took my eyes 24 hours to get used to this monitor. It's the same feeling as when you get new glasses: your eyes have to learn to compensate. This monitor is so much brighter and bigger that my eyes didn't know where to focus. That was yesterday. Today it's better.

The 700m comes with a video driver that offers rotation. It's good because the 204T rotates. I love portrait mode. I thought I would use it exclusively in portrait mode, but now I find myself wanting to switch back and forth. It's inconvenient to change the rotation setting: right click on the desktop, Graphics Properties..., other tab, 0 degrees or 90 degrees, OK, then it asks if you want to keep the setting. Very tedious each time I want to rotate the monitor.

The driver has hot keys that should let me rotate the monitor with a single key combination. Alas, it doesn't work.

Then I'm using PaintShop Pro (version 5: I'm a dinosaur), and I notice that it is *very* sluggish. Adjusting the trim rectangle is a huge problem. After a few minutes I realize that it must be the rotating driver that's the problem. I turned off rotation and rotated the monitor back to landscape, and the PSP performance problem went away.

Hmm. That's two major issues with the driver. Maybe there is an upgrade. Turns out I am running the driver that Microsoft shipped. It's an Intel driver but it is provided by the Microsoft automatic download site.

There is a driver at the Intel site with a much higher major version number, but it refuses to install on the 700m.

There is a driver on the Dell site that is the same major and minor version as the driver from Microsoft. However, the build number is lower. It's a downgrade. I tried it anyway, and I am surprised that both problems went away.

Now I can rotate with a single key combination. Very nice. (Not as nice as if it rotated automatically, but we can't have everything. I tried to install Samsung's AutoRotate software, and it screwed everything up. Put the 20" monitor in VGA resolution.)

And performance is much better in rotated mode.

I'm in great shape, thanks to a driver from Dell that is a downgrade of the driver from Microsoft.