PB said:
Why should a modern video card driver require you to uninstall the old
version to install the new?
You don't have to do that with nVidia drivers, but then ATI was never very
good at writing software, drivers, etc.
I made a huge mistake upgrading my Ti 4200 to a Radeon 9600 Pro, that's two
occasions now that I have been burned harshly by ATI, and there will never
be a third.
Drivers aren't like other software. When the card is displaying video, there
are a lot of files in use. Installing over the old driver means some of
those files might not get overwritten and you'll wind up with a mix of files
with the same names but different versions.
In an ideal world it wouldn't happen, or cause you problems if it did. But
this isn't that kind of world. Computers are complicated and some of the
people who use them are stupid and lazy.
A clean install of Windows is better than updating over and old version, and
a clean driver install is better than installing over an old version for the
same reason. It's cheap insurance against unnecessary glitches that may be
hard to diagnose.
Many times when people come here complaining because of problems with a
particular game or app, they find others don't have the same symptoms and a
clean install cures the problem.
You can be as biased against ATI as you want, it's a free country. But your
failure to follow the installation directions sort of undermines your
argument that any hassles you might have experienced are due to bad drivers.
You can install the ATI drivers exactly the way you're used to installing
Nvidia drivers. A lot of people do, and don't have any trouble.
On the other hand, a lot of people uninstall old Nvidia drivers before
installing new ones for exactly the reasons I listed above. That's why there
are a number of third-party driver removal apps like Detonator Destroyer
around.
To each his own, but I don't think there are many people around who would
agree with you that upgrading from a Ti 4200 to a 9600 Pro is a bad move.
