Steam...

[Rodéric]

Doing the uninstall-reinstall song-and-dance with AMD drivers requires a restart inbetween, and reports say that the uninstaller doesn't actually delete ANYTHING anyway. So...whattafuck?

Nvidia's drivers do an automatic uninstall of the old drivers first these days (they have for over a year now I believe), so you don't have to uninstall-restart manually.

Plus they have a profile manager that is actually useful, and works, and which don't insult users by how stupidly onerous it is to manage.

I just let ATI drivers do their magic, it works, I don't even need to reboot my machine once, it's been like that ever since I bought my HD5...

Also there's a profile manager in CCC now, not really used it much though as I don't see the point of messing with (hopefully carefuly dev chosen) gfx settings.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Well, I tried about once a year on different hardware, for about four years. And my experience is, that they either think you're irritating or pirating.

It's never their problem, as they just sold a million units.

You managed to make 2 posts with ranting about something (again and again) and in the meanwhile you refuse to answer any of the questions I made so I/we could help you.


I really don't think your purpose in this thread is to solve your problems, so I'll just let you be.

 

[Grall]

I just let ATI drivers do their magic, it works

Yeah, it works, but just letting the new driver version stomp all over the previous is not what AMD recommends. They still say we should uninstall the old driver first.

Also there's a profile manager in CCC now

Yeah I know, and it's terrible. You need to load profiles manually (no app detection, wut, what is that?!), and from what I can tell it just takes the currently active 3D settings as your profile, which is just messy and plain BAD way of going about things! Nvidia's profile editor gives you a copy of all the settings so you can edit them easily and conveniently. It's like 15 times better than AMD's crap, and it's been available for ages too.

 

[Davros]

Frank out of interest, what software do you not have problems with ?

 

[LunchBox]

How about for starters, give us your PC specs on the computer givin you the problem?
also if you can take a printshot of your task manager with the processes tab so we can see which programs are running in the background...

 

[Davros]

problems with games two hours to update ati drivers (took me 5mins and i did it the proper way, uninstall, reboot, install)
that would suggest something more serious
anything showing up in event manager i would also do a disc scan /anti virus scan/ anti malware scan/ memtest/ ati artifact tool

 

[snarfbot]

does it just become unresponsive, does it crash to desktop, or bsod?

try adding the following arguments to the game, by right clicking half life 2 in your steam library and selecting launch options -dxlevel 70 -novid -console. thatll skip the video and bring you straight to a console without loading a level see if it helps.

 

[Arwin]

Slightly off-topic but PC stuff in the driver arena is still definitely not perfect. A year ago Steam offered me to manage my graphics drivers for me (ATI) and that seriously messed things up. Not only that, but it, like Windows, also things because I have some kind of Nvidia chipset on my system as well (not for graphics, but some other main board thing) they keep wanting to install display drivers as well, which then conflict with the other graphics drivers (fortunately it doesn't want to load both ATI and Nvidia drivers ... ). Adding insult to injury, both also keep giving me the wrong drivers for my on-board sound card. I've had to disable and reinstall those a whole bunch of times, and I've thought for a while that Flash was the cause, but no, windows kept selecting the wrong drivers. So in this case both windows and steam do a lousy job, but steam was worse.

These things can be pretty frustrating.

On the other hand I've never had any issue so far with Steam as a games service - games I tried or bought through Steam have always worked great (insofar as they run great on my modest X1700) and installed without a hitch.

 

[homerdog]

You mean the Mobility X1700? The one with twelve pixel shaders?

 

[Arwin]

You mean the Mobility X1700? The one with twelve pixel shaders?

No no, an Acer Aspire X1700 q8200 quad with 4gb RAM, and recently upgraded from an ATI 4350 512MB to 5570 1GB.

 

[homerdog]

Okay I was wondering what kind of gaming you were doing on an X1700.

 

[Arwin]

Now that I am using OS/X Lion a little more, I can't get over how convenient having a unified App Store is. From searching for little utilities to getting reliable reviews and automatic version update management, it is quite the step up. Yes, so it costs more money to publish something there even if you do so for free (something like $100 per year for publishers), but golly it does make life easier!

Now I really want something like that on PC too. Hopefully Microsoft gives it a serious go, but if not Steam could try to go there as well and make something universal for many platforms, or who knows amazon?

 

[hoho]

Now I really want something like that on PC too.

Technically package managers in various Linux distributions are quite similar, just there aren't much commercial stuff in them

 

[Arwin]

Technically package managers in various Linux distributions are quite similar, just there aren't much commercial stuff in them

True, the latest Ubuntu release has added reviews as well, and things may improve there. But yeah, I am surprised by how much useful stuff is already in the App Store. I even noticed scanning software form our parent company.