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ATI/Nvidia Says "No Support" to Laptop Owners for Vista


Author:  Jason Jacobs
Date:  2007.07.20
Topic:  Other
Provider:  Techwarelabs
Manufacturer:  Killer Notebooks





ATI/Nvidia Says "No Support" to Laptop Owners for Vista

 

No Support, No Joke:

Microsoft Windows Vista has been out now for more than 6 months. At first ATI was praised for supporting Vista and Nvidia was criticized for not supporting their products. Quietly however ATI and Nvidia has not been providing drivers for mobility/Go customers. I can hear you saying "You're Kidding Right" nope but I wish I was.

ATI's Response

Nvidia's Response:

It does not stop there though, ATI does not even provide telephone or e-mail support having adopted a "you bought it, you own it, don't ask us for help" attitude. The ATI website runs its customers in circles when looking for support to the point that you must register your product and give them your contact information before you are allowed to see contact telephone numbers for support. To be fair Nvidia does not list any contact information for their Go graphics cards and there is no feedback survey that you can fill out.

Are you starting to get the feeling that either they hate their laptop business or they hate developing drivers for Vista?

What happens when you attempt to contact ATI regarding support of Mobility Radeon cards? Absolutely nothing. . . you are informed that ATI does not support the mobility radeon product and that you should contact your OEM manufacturer for updates drivers. Well thats great, how often does Dell, Compaq, HP, and Sony update their drivers? Can we all say rarely? Now what if you bought your notebook from a smaller company or built your own. Hold on to your original CD and pray that it has drivers for Vista on it as you won't be getting any support from ATI any time soon.

Passing the Buck is Easier:

So why exactly is there no mobility/Go support for Vista? Some might argue that there is some influence from AMD occuring but we think it has a lot more to do with Microsoft and DX10 their latest product. Lets examine the list of non-supported video chips.

For ATI:

Well now thats interesting. All of the video chipsets on the list are DX9 based. Might AMD/ATI be pushing DX10 enabled laptops through the denial of support of DX9 mobility based laptops? While that is entirely possible take a look at the bottom two lines where they list Vista 32bit and 64bit editions. Does this imply that ATI has left the door open to denial of Vista support entirely from its mobility lineup?

DX10 support is not introduced in ATI's lineup until the HD 2400 and up series. For even the DX10 series cards ,however, we could not find the drivers listed on ATI's site. It seems that any availability of mobility drivers is completely absent from ATI's site for Microsoft Vista.

And now what is Microsoft's response to this lack of support?

While Nvidia has no such detailed listing their actual driver support for their line of Go cards is even more pathetic though equally devoid of any support for Vista. At Least ATI lists more drivers for XP on the Mobility side of things.

No Comment is a Comment:

We sent off several e-mails to Microsoft seeking their response to ATI and Nvidia's lack of support for their latest version of Windows and received only default statements or nothing at all. It seems that Microsoft's response is a lack of response which does make sense. Vista is without a doubt aimed at providing greater visual feedback to users. The interface itself is much more fluid and the capability for things like Dreamscene in Ultimate and Aero in versions starting with Premium certainly do add to the overall user experience. It seems likely that Microsoft's lack of comment could very well help them sell more copies of Vista to ATI Mobility and Nvidia Go owners that find themselves unable to upgrade or update their systems and are forced to purchase new laptops. Once again Microsoft is pushing upgrading and new hardware purchases like a drug dealer with their latest designer drug. While we feel that this practice is wholly irresponsible and ethically incorrect we cannot deny that it is also the nature of the computer industry.

Back to ATI and Nvidia:

Complete lack of support for Mobility and Go owners for an operating system is unacceptable. We are not talking about Windows 98, ME, or 2000 here. This is Vista, the latest offering from Microsoft. Were Mobility/Go owners looking for XP drivers they are readily available to support most cards from ATI. Nvidia support for Go owners is woefully lacking even with XP and is limited to the 7800/7900 laptops. Where is the support for the 6XXX series or the new Santa Rosa laptops with 8400 and 8600 chips.

It seems that ATI and Nvidia have adopted a pass the buck philosophy with regards to their driver support for laptop owners. This disturbing trend could have severe impact on unsuspecting owners who traditionally lose the OEM disks that come with their laptops. In some cases driver disks are not even offered with the driver support being preloaded on the laptop. An owner is only one hard drive crash or OS failure away from essentially owning a paperweight or facing an expensive RMA bill from the OEM or a technician.

Until Nvidia and ATI want to step up to the plate and actually support the products that they make and sell. We suggest you take a look at http://www.laptopvideo2go.com for your driver needs and send a nice e-mail to both ATI and Nvidia requesting that they resume support for their customers.

Thanks goes out to Killer Notebooks for making us aware that ATI and Nvidia lacked support for their own products. We might mention that the forum Guru of Gaming provides excellent user feedback and support for laptop owners in a no nonsense fashion.

 



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