hobbit

well, now he went and searched the forums and replied with his generic cut&paste rant to ALL ati problems ever posted (I found some more than two months old at the top now), trying to bring it to life... I came to forums this morning and wondered wholly schmolly, all those people suddenly having problems with ATI... convenient how other card problems have thus sunk back

60 posts in 2 months by him, all the same cut&paste... not one useful, unrelated post... I mean I've been burned by bad products before, but this is bordering on psychosis

that's a kind of determination I would admire if applied for good...

I was amused initially, but now I'm disturbed that there are people like this walking around, giving advice that some poor soul is going to accept :-(

burned by a product? Post it in the "bad faulty products" forum... hey -- that's what's it there for. If somebody asks later, give them a two line summary and point them to there... and *try* to be somewhat objective and consider that maybe you personally just weren't born under a lucky star

Yes, Hobbit seems a tad upset.
Maybe he shouldn't buy anymore ATI products.

Maybe we should tell him he needs to try a little harder at getting it to work and getting some tech support.

He'd probably go postal.
:-)

I wonder what hobbit thinks about ATI?

ATI FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE

Epiphanic Lucidity

I will never buy another ATI product. ATI sucks. The new ATI Radeons suck. The drivers don’t work for scat on win2k. Driver updates are non-existent as in the past. They have no toll free tech support. Their new Radeon cards ship with win2k drivers, which don’t work properly. If you want to feel scat on buy Radeon.

NOTE: I bought two of the ATI AIW Radeon cards for two systems both identical accept in the amount of ram and a few different peripherals. Niether card worked on either system properly. Don’t believe me take a look around people are starting to figure it out for themselves. Some people will say I should stop complaining and switch to a different operating system like win98SE. Those same people are enabling ATI to get away with this crap.

Asus CUSL2
P3 700 (Not OC) Not necessary really. Can do 933 fine though.
320MB SDRAM PC133 Cas2
SBLive Platinum 5.1
2 Maxtor 45GB AT100 7200
Maxtor AT100 Controller
Toshiba 8x DVD
Plextor Plexwriter 8/20
Linksys 10/100 Ethernet Card

Previously Owned two V3 3500TV’s which didn’t support Win2k initially but has supported it for about half a year now and EVERYTHING worked even with the beta drivers, unlike ATI which released their newer card with Win2k drivers which don’t work with 70% of the card properly.

I wish I still had a copy of the long and detailed report I typed out to them concerning problems with their card. In the phone calls to them (which the customer pays for) they could not help me but were interested in my errors as some had already been reported and some were new to them and some helped them figure out more in detail why certain errors would occur. They encouraged a detailed write up. I did them a favor at my own expense and time and then they replied with we will only fix problems reported to a significant degree… Only if customers complain enough will they bother fixing problem. What a joke. In other words they know of problems but are not fixing them until their customers really start complaining in droves.

Under win2k these are the problems I encountered. All games I tried using OpenGL which is “fully”supported by ATI “Full OpenGL® and Microsoft® DirectX® support.” of which I probably own 40 have graphics that look like [-peep-] and are too dark which cannot be fixed without second hand programs or special tweaking instructions/editing of CFG files etc... (3DFX had a Gamma slider allowing you to brighten or darken Direct 3d or OpenGL games independently besides the desktop quickly solving this problem. Direct3d, which works on some games, looks like crap on some (examples: Diablo 2, Quake one) and good on others… Compare Diablo 2 using OpenGL with a voodoo card versus Radeon Direct3d ((pixilated and snowy), (Radeon fails if you try OpenGL). TV looks good but the downloading of the TV schedule fails half the time. TV out onscreen ATI software controls for turning the TV on and off do not work at all. When you plug in your Svideo your automatically outputting your pc signal to your TV and cannot switch it on and off like you’re supposed to be able to on your pc, instead you have to reboot!, but there is more… Furthermore once you view your pc on you TV your graphics no longer fit your pc monitor screen and you end up using your mouse to scroll to areas on the peripheral of your pc monitor you cant see any longer unless you scroll there. This problem is terrible since you cannot use the controls that come with the card to switch back to using the monitor as the screen properly. What happens is that you get stuck with this scrolling problem and it doesn’t go away even when you reboot. The only way I found to fix it is to completely uninstall the drivers and then reinstall them and then set the monitor resolution low to like 640x480 and then reset it back up to whatever you want. You see upon rebooting and reinstalling the drivers the problem is still there but now if you change the resolution down to 640x480 and then back up to whatever you want it set things back to normal. This is very time consuming process. ATI never even replied to this particular problem. DVD playback, which is hardware driven stutters! This I couldn’t believe and was the last straw because I thought that at least worked when I first watched the beginning of the Matrix for about 30 seconds to see if it was working. Later I go to show a friend and it is stuttering as we watch it for a few minutes. Mpeg4 playback fails! ATI was aware of the Mpeg4 playback failures but has not fixed this problem yet! This card is a nightmare folks! I have forgotten much of what I wrote them detailing errors received and better descriptions of the problems but this should be enough to explain what a piece of crap ATI is foisting. Foisting (Webster): “To give somebody something inferior: to give somebody something inferior on the pretence that it is genuine, valuable, or desirable.” A good synonym for foisting would be FRAUD.
After spending about four hours total on the phone with them and getting them all the information they wanted I get no reassurances. All I get is hopefully we will have an answer to some of these problems in the future. Blah Blah Blah. Month goes by and nothing. Many people have posted on Tomshardware as to the untrustworthy nature of ATI concerning drivers and their inability to act quickly to fix driver problems. I now know what they were talking about first hand. Don’t make the same mistake. How can you purchase a card that ships with Win2k drivers today and have it not work in everything properly accept TV in? When it takes half a year to fix all the problems on such a product why bother buying it since by that time the card will be selling for less than half what you paid for it and will be half as fast as newer cards on the market. ATI is going the way of the Dodos if they continue with this irresponsible behavior.

An email I sent ATI in response to a customer support reply that was more useless than the long distance phone support.

Thank you very much for you're very kind reply... I find the information I have provided your company with at my expense much more valuable to you than the information you have provided me. Reiteration of solutions I have already tried does neither of us any good. I have returned both cards to the original retailer. In the future please refrain from releasing unfinished products. I and other customers regard such actions as unlawful. I can no longer recommend your products due to poor driver performance under win2k (I have not tested any other OS nor do I wish to do so as your product ships with supposed perfect win2k drivers), which I have tested extensively. The long list of problems with your drivers is tiresome. DVD play, which I previously thought, worked perfectly stutters randomly. In the future please don't rely on your customer base to solve your problems for you because in the end you lose valuable promotional commentary along with a good customer. No need to reply I just thought you should know how thoroughly disgusted I am with your product and your company.


Interesting Article in Worth magazine Jan 2001, by Eric Alterman.
(How I feel)
Quote:

“”This “screw the consumer’s time, it’s not costing us anything” attitude appears to exist across the entire spectrum of new technology industries. I bought a scanner from UMAX that has never worked. There’s nobody at the other end to help, at least nobody I had the patience to find. The ugly thing has been sitting on my desk, unused, for two years. And have you tried to hook up a DSL line recently” I have, and I had to give up on that, too. It turned out Verizon, the new beast created out of Bell Atlantic’s merger with just about everybody else, had not yet come up with a modem compatible with Windows Me, though apparently it neglected to mention that to the person on the phone who was all to willing to take an order and let the caller waste hours trying to make the damn thing work. Chris Taylor of Time recently wrote of spending almost six months stuck inside a similar nightmare courtesy of Pacific Bell, which given its location, really ought to know better. The truth was that the company did not even offer the service, called D-Slam, that it had promised him, as it had run out of the hardware, but it continued to advertise it because, a rep admitted, their “competitors haven’t stopped advertising yet: The worst of it is that the entire time you are wasting away on hold, watching your fingernails grow, the company brags about its new and improved service menu.
This whole sector of the economy feels like the Soviet Union: Long waiting lines, no service, contempt for the consumer, products that don’t work when shipped, but somebody with the power to create a little trouble for the big boys arrives, and everybody starts jumping. Of course, the obvious differences are that innovation barely existed in Soviet industries, while the computer manufacturers are just about the most innovative people of all time. But the net result turns out to be more suffering for the rest of us.””

Hobbit needs to shut up. It's no surprise to anyone that he couldn't get the card to work. Yet others have on the exact same system. Sounds like human/hobbit error to me.

"Are you saying that I can dodge bullets?"

I agree.

I really enjoy these posts.

I'm pretty sure I will steer clear of ATI from now on after reading his stories.

The time and effort this individual has spent in documenting his problem is amazing and should be recognized.

I am a crappy documentor and have been criticized by many companies for that fault. This guy could easily have a permanent job in many many companies utilizing his incredible documentation and determination skills and traits.

gorenc: I'm sorry, don't know you well enough; is that sarcasm or are you for real?

also, just to avoid the remote possibility it is unclear to you, the rest of us in this thread *were* being sarcastic... just making triply sure...

Dear God!! I think he means it.

"Are you saying that I can dodge bullets?"

i also have many companies i don't like (including ati), but hobbit, u are WAY too friggin obsessed!

Just getting the word out. Please give all of my oppostion a good fire hose necrocolonic. That should clean out the bulk of their nervous system. The obfusticating and bothersome bunch couldnt be more flummoxed.

Honestly didnt need a thesaurus. Occasionaly I have used such words in conversation. No, I expect no one talks like they type or write.

"A masochist walked up to a sadist, and said 'Hurt me'. The sadist said 'No' and walked away."

It is a nice thought but it is not true. People type and converse vis-a-vis very differently, less so over the phone but still differently. Lessoning degrees of difference of course depending on the milieu.

"A masochist walked up to a sadist, and said 'Hurt me'. The sadist said 'No' and walked away."

It is a known fact. Ask any college english teacher, socialogist, psychologist etc. Must we argue this point now too? Take my word or find out yourself. To add to my point on this earlier: People also handwrite differently than they type as well. Furthermore the same person will handwrite differently than they type.

"A masochist walked up to a sadist, and said 'Hurt me'. The sadist said 'No' and walked away."

Listen ursinophiliac, vis-a-vis does mean face to face look it up, smartypants! Obviously "lessoning" was a misspelling but you didnt recognize that either, but assumed it wasnt an english word, lol. -LESSENING- Nope, I dont need the thesaurus to come up with words that flummox you. Anyone who knows me would tell you so. You and jg38141 both,it seems, dont want to accept what I am telling you is common knowledge about how people type and talk differently and the rest I mentioned concerning that subject. You both seem to think it is somehow underhanded and that your both above it. What you dont seem to get is that it takes place naturally. Like I told jg38141, take my word for it or ask any college, sociologist, psychologist or English Professor, etc. Why, Kodiak do you find it necessary to seek out such trivial things to attack and discredit me with? Must you be so shallow and attack such triviality in this forum. I always laugh when I see people on here so desparate that they attack others over spelling and grammer. They are only demonstrating loud and clear they have nothing else to attack with. Now before you say ursinophiliac is not a word I will tell you it isnt because it is a neologism which I made up.

Maybe you should read my entire post again!

ATI FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE

Epiphanic Lucidity

Read what I have to say and make your own decision.

I will never buy another ATI product. ATI consistently provides drivers that suck. The new ATI Radeons suck… the drivers don’t work for scat on win2k. Driver updates are non-existent as in the past. They have no toll free tech support, so when you get it and it doesn’t work right you’re in for a long wait before it does. Their new Radeon cards ship with win2k drivers, which don’t work properly. If you want to feel scat on buy Radeon.

NOTE: I bought two of the ATI AIW Radeon cards for two systems both identical accept in the amount of ram and a few different peripherals. Neither card worked on either system properly. Don’t believe me take a look around people, are starting to figure it out for themselves. Some people will say I should stop complaining and switch to a different operating system like win98SE. Those same people are enabling ATI to get away with this crap. No I never tested with win98SE or WinME because that was not my OS and I am not going to switch to a different OS for ATI, lol that is so funny especially when the ATI AIW Radeon ships with win2k full release drivers. Anyone who says you should switch OS’s to make the card work is just plain out to lunch.

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." - Lillian Hellman

System Specs:

Win2kPro
Enlight 7230 Case
Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro
Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
Everglide Giganta (Black)
Golden Orb H/S & Fan
Asus CUSL2
3DFX V5 5500 AGP
3DFX V3 2K PCI
ViewSonic P815 Professional Series 21 Monitor”
HP A4033A 20” Monitor
Blackout Buster 500VA
P3 700 I don’t o/c it but it will do 933 fine and post at 1GHZ.
Kodak DC280 Zoom
VideoBlaster Webcam 3
320MB SDRAM PC133 Cas2 Infineon
Epson Stylus 900
Epson Perfection 1200S
SBLive Platinum 5.1
2 Maxtor 45GB AT100 7200
Adaptec 2930 SCSI Controller
Maxtor AT100 Controller
Toshiba 8x DVD
Plextor Plexwriter External 8/20
Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400
Linksys 10/100 Ethernet Card
Linksys 10/100 Hub

Previously Owned two V3 3500TV’s which didn’t support Win2k initially but has supported it for well over half a year now and EVERYTHING worked even with the beta drivers, unlike ATI which released their newer card with Win2k drivers which don’t work with 70% of the card properly.

I wish I still had a copy of the long and detailed report I typed out to them concerning the problems with their card, but I formatted my HD and started from scratch anticipating this suggestion after initial trouble shooting efforts failed.
Note: Isn’t it irksome that the common panacea for computer problems these days is the all to often suggestion/demand that you reformat your HD and start from scratch to try to solve problems with a new piece of hardware. I find that this policy is absolutely unacceptable and is abused in the computer industry, which relies on it to make their hardware work rather than hiring more knowledgeable help, which could save the customer much time and wasted effort. Do you think they tell Bill Gates he has to reformat his PC? “”This “screw the consumer’s time, it’s not costing us anything” attitude appears to exist across the entire spectrum of new technology industries.”” (Worth magazine Jan 2001, by Eric Alterman. Excerpt from his article below)
In the phone calls to them (which the customer pays for) they could not help me but were interested in my errors as some had already been reported and some were new to them and some helped them figure out more in detail why certain errors would occur. They encouraged a detailed write up. I did them a favor at my own expense and time and then they replied with we will only fix problems reported to a significant degree… Only if customers complain enough will they bother fixing a problem. What a joke. In other words they know of problems but are not fixing them until their customers really start complaining in droves.
Under win2k these are the problems I encountered. All games I tried using OpenGL which is “fully”supported by ATI “Full OpenGL® and Microsoft® DirectX® support.” of which I probably own 40 have graphics that look like [-peep-] and are too dark which cannot be fixed without second hand programs or special tweaking instructions/editing of CFG files etc... (3DFX had a Gamma slider allowing you to brighten or darken Direct 3d or OpenGL games independently besides the desktop quickly solving this problem. Direct3d, which works on some games, looks like crap on some (examples: Diablo 2, Quake one) and good on others… Compare Diablo 2 using OpenGL with a voodoo card versus Radeon Direct3d ((pixilated and snowy), (Radeon fails if you try OpenGL). TV looks good but the downloading of the TV schedule fails half the time. TV out onscreen ATI software controls for turning the TV on and off do not work at all. When you plug in your Svideo your automatically outputting your pc signal to your TV and cannot switch it on and off like you’re supposed to be able to on your pc, instead you have to reboot!, but there is more… Furthermore once you view your pc on you TV your graphics no longer fit your pc monitor screen and you end up using your mouse to scroll to areas on the peripheral of your pc monitor you cant see any longer unless you scroll there. This problem is terrible since you cannot use the controls that come with the card to switch back to using the monitor as the screen properly. What happens is that you get stuck with this scrolling problem and it doesn’t go away even when you reboot. The only way I found to fix it is to completely uninstall the drivers and then reinstall them and then set the monitor resolution low to like 640x480 and then reset it back up to whatever you want. You see upon rebooting and reinstalling the drivers the problem is still there but now if you change the resolution down to 640x480 and then back up to whatever you want it set things back to normal. This is very time consuming process. ATI never even replied to this particular problem. DVD playback, which is hardware driven stutters! This I couldn’t believe and was the last straw because I thought that at least worked when I first watched the beginning of the Matrix for about 30 seconds to see if it was working. Later I go to show a friend and it is stuttering as we watch it for a few minutes. Mpeg4 playback fails! ATI was aware of the Mpeg4 playback failures but has not fixed this problem yet! This card is a nightmare folks! I have forgotten much of what I wrote them detailing errors received and better descriptions of the problems but this should be enough to explain what a piece of crap ATI is foisting. Foisting (Webster): “To give somebody something inferior: to give somebody something inferior on the pretence that it is genuine, valuable, or desirable.” A good synonym for foisting would be FRAUD.
After spending about four hours total on the phone with them and getting them all the information they wanted I get no reassurances. All I get is hopefully we will have an answer to some of these problems in the future. Blah Blah Blah. Month goes by and no driver updates that fix the milieu of problems. Many people have posted on Tomshardware in the past as to the untrustworthy nature of ATI concerning drivers and their inability to act quickly to fix driver problems. I now know what they were talking about first hand. Don’t make the same mistake. How can you purchase a card that ships with Win2k drivers today and have it not work in everything properly accept TV in? When it takes half a year to fix all the problems on such a product why bother buying it since by that time the card will be selling for less than half what you paid for it and will be half as fast as newer cards on the market. ATI may fall just like 3DFX but for poor drivers and poor support, not speed, if they continue with this irresponsible behavior.

An email I retained sent to ATI in response to a customer support reply that was more useless than the long distance phone support.

Thank you very much for you're very kind reply... I find the information I have provided your company with at my expense much more valuable to you than the information you have provided me. Reiteration of solutions I have already tried does neither of us any good. I have returned both cards to the original retailer. In the future please refrain from releasing unfinished products. I and other customers regard such actions as unlawful. I can no longer recommend your products due to poor driver performance under win2k (I have not tested any other OS nor do I wish to do so as your product ships with supposed perfect win2k drivers), which I have tested extensively. The long list of problems with your drivers is tiresome. DVD play, which I previously thought, worked perfectly stutters randomly. In the future please don't rely on your customer base to solve your problems for you because in the end you lose valuable promotional commentary along with a good customer. No need to reply I just thought you should know how thoroughly disgusted I am with your product and your company.

Interesting Article in Worth magazine Jan 2001, by Eric Alterman, which reflects how many of us feel…

“”This “screw the consumer’s time, it’s not costing us anything” attitude appears to exist across the entire spectrum of new technology industries. I bought a scanner from UMAX that has never worked. There’s nobody at the other end to help, at least nobody I had the patience to find. The ugly thing has been sitting on my desk, unused, for two years. and have you tried to hook up a DSL line recently” I have, and I had to give up on that, too. It turned out Verizon, the new beast created out of Bell Atlantic’s merger with just about everybody else, had not yet come up with a modem compatible with Windows Me, though apparently it neglected to mention that to the person on the phone who was all to willing to take an order and let the caller waste hours trying to make the damn thing work. Chris Taylor of Time recently wrote of spending almost six months stuck inside a similar nightmare courtesy of Pacific Bell, which given its location, really ought to know better. The truth was that the company did not even offer the service, called D-Slam, that it had promised him, as it had run out of the hardware, but it continued to advertise it because, a rep admitted, their “competitors haven’t stopped advertising yet: The worst of it is that the entire time you are wasting away on hold, watching your fingernails grow, the company brags about its new and improved service menu.
This whole sector of the economy feels like the Soviet Union: Long waiting lines, no service, contempt for the consumer, products that don’t work when shipped, but somebody with the power to create a little trouble for the big boys arrives, and everybody starts jumping. Of course, the obvious differences are that innovation barely existed in Soviet industries, while the computer manufacturers are just about the most innovative people of all time. But the net result turns out to be more suffering for the rest of us.””


"A masochist walked up to a sadist, and said 'Hurt me'. The sadist said 'No' and walked away."

I'm sure people type write and talk a bit differently, of course, since you have a chance to edit on thought when you're typing, however, not to the extremes that you sometimes go to. Sure I don't talk EXACTLY how I type, if we must split hairs, but I type pretty close to how I talk, and I never say "obfusticating" and so on here I'd never type it.

"Are you saying that I can dodge bullets?"

I dont know what your using to look up vis-a-vis with, but you need to try another resource. Your starting to look stupid.

Yes, your argueing that you dont type differently than you speak. You are thus just plain ignorant if you really believe that and my entire post is relevant to you especially. If your meaning to say that your typing and speach are different but on the whole much less difference exists between your type and speach than others, like jg38141, that is fine. However, you seem to believe your immune somehow, lol. It is not a matter of choosing to speak and type identically. It happens subconciously. No, matter how hard you try there would still be a difference.

"A masochist walked up to a sadist, and said 'Hurt me'. The sadist said 'No' and walked away."

We were never talking about me or you, just people.

"A masochist walked up to a sadist, and said 'Hurt me'. The sadist said 'No' and walked away."

Apparently, you both missed my rule about not using any words over 5 letters.

I'm going to have to put you on probation.

I ain't seen a beating like that since somebody stuck a banana in my pants and turned a monkey loose

Hey, I'm the old hand....

Nothing pisses me off more than someone who gets on someone elses case for their english comprehension/usage when enlish is not their first language. I give anyone who can speak more than one language tons of credit, even if they don't know the finer points of said language. I took three years of French in highschool and I remember just about nothing.

In regards to typing differently than you speak and so on, of course you do. This is not a point of arguement, anyone who would take the time to think about it would come to the that conclusion. But most people have more to do in there lives than bitch about ATI and study the difference in the way we talk and type.

I have not read your bitch nor will I ever. People that use words like you do are phonies. Always trying to prove there superior intelligance, like a peacock (sic) strutting his feathers.

BTW, I also had a problem with an ATI vid card. I wrote them a decent email (concise and non-threatening) and within two weeks they had sent me a new card that was better and more expensive than the one I originally purchased. That is why I still use there cards today.

Also, how many languages do you speak???

pill128

Take your pill, and get some sleep.

If you bang your head up against a brick wall long enough, all you get is a sore head, Dont you think its time to move on?

So long and thanks for all the fish

Shame on you Crashman, don't be the voice of reason when things are starting to heat up again.

Actually I don't really have anything against Hobbit right now... he has never made me mad

I'm not ready yet ;-)

People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.