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(1) Regarding Vista, I have tried to run Vista on several graphics cards with the Dock II and a T42 and could not get it to run on ANY of them. In EACH case I got a device driver issue (possibly a conflict - Vista could not load/start the driver) for the Video card itself and for a PCI bridge device (so problems ALWAYS with two drivers). I tried 3 or 4 different cards. I finally gave up, after reading online about lots of people who could not get Vista to work with two installed graphics cards at the same time, with symptoms similar to mine. This was Vista RC2. I decided that a future edition of Vista might address this problem, and it seems that is the case, because ateece is reporting two video cards working at the same time with Vista RTM. (Incidentally, the problem was not solved by disabling the internal ATI graphics chip, a 9600 in my case - it could only be resolved, as far as I could tell, by physically removing the graphics card/chip, which of course is impossible with a laptopambientscape wrote:well, thanks for the reply. I don;t need it to run Vista thou......just a descent graphic card that can play couple of games will do. So which card you guys talking about that can be really suitable?
)(2) The PCI slot is a LOW PERFORMANCE interface. Even with a powerful Vista-ready card in there, it still might not support the Aero interface. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has tried this. The best Vista solution for the kind of setup we are interested in having (laptop docked with 2 or more external monitors) would be to buy a T60/p and an Advanced Dock, which has the higher-performace PCI Express slot.
(3) I have tried several cards: the ATI 9250, the ATI X1300 (two of them), the Nvidia GeFroce FX 5200, the NVidia 6200 OC (by BFG, thogh Chaintech also makes one), and the Matrox P650 LP PCI card. Follows is a summary of my experience with each card - note that I am driving TWO analog monitors at 1920x1200 (two Sony GDM-FW900s), which is pushing the performance limit of the PCI interface. Also, this is 2D only, I have not tried anything 3D as this doesn't interest me.
(a) The ATI 9250 I tested was a no-fan (so quiet) edition, 128MB with a dual-DVI output via an adapter. I found the text quality poor, quite blurry and hard to read, and this was worse on one of the monitors than the other. It was also quite slow with my configuration - unacceptably so, as there was a noticeable lag when you maximised a window from the taskbar as you could actually watch it drawing the window. However, the card was very stable and never crashed out on me. Possibly the quality issue would be improved on other versions of this card, I don't know. And the performance issue would be less of an issue with less resolution to drive - if I switched my monitors from dual to mirrored (same screen on each), which effectively halved the resolution that adapter was being asked to drive, it speeded things up considerably. So if you're driving significantly less resolution than I am, and you got a different edition of this card with better video quality/sharpness, it would maybe be ok. The card I had was a DirectX 8 version, which most of them are, but there are one or two which are DirectX 9 capable (check Newegg). I was NOT able to get this card working concurrently with the internal card (so two monitors max, no LCD) - I had to disable the internal graphics card to get Windows to boot up without BSOD.
(b) The two ATI X1300 cards I had were better performing (faster, clearer text) but both had fans and so there was a bit of noise. One was 128MB, the other 256MB. I didn't notice any significant performace difference (in 2D) but with EITHER card, after a while my computer would simply freeze up. I'd be doing something, and suddenly the mouse cursor would freeze and that was that, the computer was rendered totally unresponsive, requiring a power-cycle via the power switch. (Interestingly, there was a pattern to this - with one of the cards, for example, I would get the system hang if I tried to right-click on a file. With the other one, attempting to install a program would cause the hang. If I avoided these activities, I could go for a fair while without any system hang, but it would always come sooner or later.) The system hangs rendered these cards useless for me, and pretty soon I sent them both back. If this is an issue not with the ATI chips but with the third-party setup, and you could find an X1300 card that is stable with the Dock II, it would be a pretty good solution. It's a fairly high-powered card, and is Vista ready (i.e. will run Aero, though possibly not through a PCI interface).
(c) I only tried the Nvidia FX 5200 briefly, not enough to know whether it works well with the Dock II. As soon as I bought it I noticed mine was not dual-monitor (despite the claim on the packaging) so I sent it back. I did try it once, and there was no video signal, but I'm not sure what this means.
(d) I have had the best luck with the NVidia 6200 OC by BFG, though this too has not been without its problems. First, the card is powerful (yes Vista Aero ready) and although it has a fan, it is quiet - the quietest fan on any of the PCI graphics cards I have tried by far. It's not loud enough to be annoying with my T42 docked right there on my desk, and I'm fussy about that (I unplugged the Dock II's fan as soon as I got the Dock because the noise drove me up the wall). The power of the card shows through the PCI interface - windows maximise promptly, and 2D video is fine at 1920x1200. It's perfectly adequate in that department for me. The quality is pretty good too, text is crisp and clear, and that's important to me. It would be the ideal solution, except I had the mother of a problem finding a good driver for the card (there are SO many versions of the Nvidia forceware drivers, it's not funny). I had two problems. One was that I would get a BSOD after an hour or two of uptime, which is a well-documented issue with NVidia cards in some systems. The other is that I could not get video to work - especially streaming video. The video player would grab all CPU cycles, would hardly play the video if at all, and the system would become unstable/unusable. The trouble was, if I found a driver that eliminated one problem, the other would appear. Finally I found a version that seemed to avoid both problems, but there are still some weirdnesses - for example, little flecks of 'missing' graphics data in some sorts of graphics objects (this is also a well-known and documented problem with Nvidia forceware drivers). I can live with the little oddities, though - at least I have a high-performance, pretty quiet card that will drive my two displays with almost no issues (in 2D).
(e) The Matrox P650 looked good on paper for what I want (good 2D performance, don't care about 3D, crisp, high quality text). But I could not get it to work in either of two Dock IIs I tried. Simply no video output, T42 would boot up with internal display, Windows would not find the device (or not load it correctly). I gave up trying to make it work when I heard reports of users finding the card noisy (fan) and slow in 2D, despite the nice crisp text. And this was the most expensive of all the cards!
Sorry for such a long post - I hope this is of some use to someone.
Out of two Dock IIs I tried, one worked with most of the video cards I tried (more or less), and the other didn't with any of them, and had the symptoms you described. By the way, I have the same video card as you, except mine is the overclocked version. I sent the faulty Dock back. I now have a third one to try, this one is brand new, so I'll report back on my experiences. In any case, I do have one (used, from eBay) Dock working ok with the card you have. And it does work really rather well, except for a driver glitch. You have to be careful which of the many drivers to use for that Nvidia card.