It would be nice if it works!
Written: Dec 11 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The card comes at a very good price.
Cons: Well, the card didn't work.
The Bottom Line: The bottomline is that this card is apparently very sensitive to certain HW configurations and that the ATI Technical Support isn't able to help at all.
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| tbarlen's Full Review: ATI TV Wonder |
I decided to buy a TV card for my daughter's PC to allow her to watch TV in her room while saving space by not buying a separate TV. Well, that's what I intended to do. I saw the ATI TV Wonder VE card in the store for 49.99$ with a 10$ mail-in rebate. So I bought it and thought to myself, let's get home and get the thing up and running. Unpacking and putting the card into the PC was a piece of cake. I then got confused with the printed installation instructions and the ones provided on the CD. The printed version told me to cancel the driver installation when Windows 98 requested me to enter the location of the driver, but the CD instructions told me to follow the Windows prompt and continue with the installation. Well I followed the CD because it had a newer date.
All the software was installed without any problems. The system rebooted and I was ready to watch my favorite TV show. At least that is what I was hoping for. The first time I started the TV from the launch pad an Initialization Wizard started. Right at the first screen the PC locked up, no mouse motion, nothing. Powered down the PC and started over again, well, this time I got to the second wizard screen and the PC locked up again. I started searching ATI's Website for some hints and tips and found several clues what could cause the freezing screen. But all of the clues were for special chip sets, which I don't have or some software prereqs that I already had, and so forth.
Some other tips recommended to update to the latest BIOS for the motherboard, etc. I updated my entire HW to the latest available drivers and code. But the problem remained the same. So I generated ATI's problem report, which by the way, collect all kinds of information about your system. I submitted a support inquiry and provided the requested information. What I got as a response was a standard e-mail telling me all kinds of things that didn't apply to my card or to things I already checked. The support guy obviously didn't even look at the information I provided.
Just one thing was left, the adapter can't share an IRQ. And my configuration shared the IRQ with my sound card. I re-arranged the adapter to another PCI slot and I had my dedicated IRQ for the TV Wonder VE card.
Now I thought it should work. The same thing happened again. A second e-mail to ATI's Tech Support was not answered at all. Wasting two days of my life to get this PnP card working I gave up and returned the card to the place I purchased it.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 49.99
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Epinions.com ID:
tbarlen
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Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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