Garoo

Argh.

I thought I was done with the expenses. Wrong. I went to the computer stores block thinking I’d buy two little, cheap PCI video cards so I could turn my third monitor on. And then… I decided to be reasonable and spend 300€ on a triple-head Matrox card. And how is that reasonable? Thing is, a single AGP video card is faster than three cheaper cards—and also because I’ve been dreaming for ages of having something better than nVidia at 2D display.

As far as performance goes, I’m not disappointed, as I can finally use all of WindowFX’s functions: transparent windows, animations, everything works instantaneously. A bit disappointed by the drivers, though: I don’t know if there’s a good technical reason for that, or they just thought it would be fine for most people, but triple-head display only works if all three monitors use the same resolution (whereas dual-head allows different resolutions). As a result, my two 17” monitors end up displaying 1024x768 because of the little third 14”, whereas I had grown quite accustomed to 1280x1024. Ok, I still have a higher total number of pixels, but I didn’t spend so much to use 1024x768, did I?

Do you realize what that means? Now I have to find a new 17” screen…