On February 8, 2008 my computer froze up on me, and after rebooting it I noticed a bunch of random red and blue dots on the display. The following day it locked up again, and on rebooting I saw red and blue blinking dots in text mode during the BIOS POST sequence.Photograph taken during POST showing a few blue and red dots At that point I knew it couldn't be a software problem, so I contacted ATI technical support to see if there was a way to test the video RAM on my Radeon X1900 XT graphics card.

Their response was "The Linux drivers available from ATI are provide are 'as is'."!

I sent a message back once more reiterating the fact that the corruption was occurring in text mode.Photograph taken during RAID controller startup showing a few
blue and red dots Their second response was practically the same as the first: "AMD/ATI currently has no support for linux based systems. The drivers are posted online for complimentary reasons."

For my third message I sent them photos of my screen during the POST sequence.Photograph taken during RAID controller startup showing a few
blue dots and an orange character Their final reply was a boilerplate message which said, in essence:

I can't believe how obtuse these people are. It's like I'm talking to a machine with pre-programmed responses, or to a luser who has never put together his own computer.

I wonder if nVidia's technical support department is more competent?

Valid XHTML 1.0!