Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Last night, I got a frantic call from a friend whose PC was taking too much time to do just about everything. Increasing the machine8217;s RAM would seem the normal thing to do, but the problem lay elsewhere. It was Microsoft Vista, the operating system installed by Microsoft a few months ago.
My friend could not understand why the machine8212;an international brand that came pre-installed with Microsoft Vista8212;was behaving thus. He knew the problem was not the hardware, and the machine had enough RAM/ hard disk/ processor speed to support what he was doing. But like many others, he had not read the fine print: acquiring the fancy graphics, wobbly windows and widgets on the desktop requires a lot of VRAM video RAM. So when I asked him about the video card, he had no idea.
Microsoft Vista is the first operating system that can actually benefit from a graphic card and let you use features like Aero to make the borders transparent, thumbnail views, flip 3D, flip view at high speed. So what are your options?
Other than the on-board graphic card, you can either buy a machine with a pre-installed graphic accelerator, or add an accelerator to your PC later. Sadly, Notebook users can8217;t do much, but for the PC/desktop users there are a number of options.
The market is led by two big names, NVidia and ATI. Both make the core processor for graphic acceleration and cards, while other vendors like XFX, Gforce and Mercury, common brands in India, use one of these chipsets to deliver high speed. You can buy an NVIDIA or an ATI chipset-based graphic card with about 128 MB RAM on board specifically for graphics for only Rs 2,000. The choice is large and there are even cards worth Rs 40,000 depending on the RAM and the speed that they can increase. So if you are facing a similar problem, just invest in a graphic card.
Gagandeep S. Sapra is the Chairman and CEO of System3 group of companies. gagandeepsystem3group.com
