Windows 7 Will Spark Lots of Video Upgrades

After downloading the Release Candidate for Windows 7, I realized that there are some of my machines that have more than adequate processors, but the graphics card have been relegated to never being updated again.

It seems that nVidia and ATi have conspired to make sure that though Windows XP machines can run Windows 7, it will require a video upgrade. Basically, if your video card, is more than about two and a half years old, or your onboard graphics is more than a year old, you’re going to be on the way for a video upgrade.

[ I am thinking now, that I am spellchecking, are there any Intel chipsets supported? I did not look, as I am certain that the 845G graphics on my P4 2.8A has no support – it only allows a max of 64 MB shared memory]

I have a machine that has an AMD chipset, but because it is not the 780G chipset, the board needs a video card to run Windows 7.  I thought it was odd that ATi had cut off the chipsets supported so far back, and since I don’t subscribe to flavor of the month, I saw that only the 3xxx and 4xxx video cards will have support.

I looked around, and since I have a couple of older nVidia video cards, I thought I’d pop one of those in, and see what happens. I assumed that any PCI express card would be covered by the nVidia drivers, but I was surprised to find that is not the case. These are cards that are supported for Vista, but no 7 support.

As I always say – It’s all about money. Microsoft gives a decent break to the people with this Release Candidate, free until next March, so the graphics card manufacturers decided it was time for us to pay up. It makes me wish for a third big player; there used to be a couple of players vying for third place, now there is nobody.

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At least everything else is fine. I guess my son is right when he says if I had been –playing games, my video cards would have been up to snuff. CPU power isn’t everything I suppose.

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In Heaven all the interesting people are missing.Friedrich Nietzsche

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