It all started on Wednesday, when my brother decided he would give Windows 8 a try, that (schizophrenic) mishmash, as he used to call it. I say used to, because today he admits that W8 is a really good system. But back to the story. Already during the installation we had a completely garbled picture – from the fact that some things looked normal but most of the elements looked “abnormal”, to the fact that every now and then (for example when we booted) the Windows 8 logo turned into red dots, or that the cursor left an endless trail.
Back then I was still saying that once I installed the proper graphics drivers, everything would be normal and nice. Even while it was installing for 1.5 hours and kept freezing somewhere, whether during the installation itself or while booting the installer, I believed the culprit was a bad network card and not the graphics card. So I pulled out the network card, but it was still acting up. Then I pulled out the graphics card, put the network card back in, and everything worked as it should. But what a disappointment it was when, after the installation finished, I put the dedicated graphics card back in, switched the cables, and it still looked terrible, even worse, in fact!
It was absolutely insane, so insane that at the normal font size you could hardly read anything at all, and when I copied something into, say, WordPad and enlarged it to a 22+ font, even then it was not much better. The whole graphics driver fix was complicated by the fact that every time I failed to boot for any of a million reasons, I had to turn off the PC, pull out the dedicated graphics card, switch the cable to the integrated graphics, start the PC, boot into normal Windows mode, set it to boot into Safe Mode, turn off the PC, put the dedicated graphics card back into the slot, swap the cables, do something in Safe Mode, hope it would finally work, set it to boot into normal mode, and restart the PC.
That day I was at it until 2 in the morning. And mind you, I had started at 9:16 PM. I remember that time because that is when we first booted from the Windows 8 DVD. Even such a long session late into the night was not enough to fix it, so the next day, Thursday, I woke up at 11 AM and had 2 hours before my brother came back from school to fix it, so that my brother could keep W8. The fact that W8 ran perfectly on the integrated graphics was not enough for him. He tried playing one game which, in his words, is “pretty” demanding on the graphics card, and it stuttered a little, but since he plays that game all the time, that was unthinkable and unacceptable to him.
To my amazement, I managed to get it working. Unfortunately, my poor memory kicked in: I had only gotten it working over an HDMI/DVI-D cable, but my brother used a different monitor connected via VGA connectors, so I did something and then could not remember what I had done afterwards, let alone how I had managed to fix it. I had even proudly shown Mom what scores my brother now had for Windows graphics and Gaming graphics in the Windows Experience Index (WEI). I was cursing, but only at myself, of course :D.
Then my brother came home while it was “out of tune” again, and of course he was angry and out of sorts too, saying that “this PC has gone through so many restarts in the last two days and shutdowns that its lifespan has been shortened by at least 30 years” – he said something along those lines :). Fortunately, my brother then left with our parents for Ostrava to the scene of the crime – I put it that way because I did not agree with my parents buying a car from the “AAA” dealers – the biggest scumbags, crooks, and bloodsuckers out there.
Luckily, they came back without a van, and I had long since given up working on it, after trying all 4 drivers that were offered to me during a manual driver reinstall – each time, of course, going through the merry-go-round I described above. In total, these were the drivers:
- Windows Basic Graphics Driver
- Gigabyte GT 220
- Gigabyte GT 220 (yes, the same one was listed twice, at least by name)
- Gigabyte GT 220 (Microsoft Corporation – WDDM 1.2)
But when not a single driver let me even boot into normal mode, I gave up for good.. I really have no idea how I managed to fix it that one time before; it must have been some kind of magic or help from above.