AV News 191 - February 2013
Laptop Purchasers Beware!
Howard Gregory
We needed to update our 6+ year old AV projection system both to cope with the
more extreme of today's effects-laden productions and also because we were
getting through the lamp life of a projector whose manufacturer no longer exists.
Choosing a new projector was no problem, but the laptop.....
I'm not a particular fan of laptops, but they are more convenient than towers
to carry around, they are what most people use, and several people had
indicated that they found it useful to have a small screen facing the lecturer. So
we went looking for a laptop. As is often the case, I felt that I knew what I wanted,
but, of course, you can only purchase what is available. Our local specialist
computer dealer is no more, so, with some misgivings, we went into the seriously
large Warrington branch of PC World.
As all the sequences we produce seem to run faultlessly on anything, they
aren't much use as test pieces. After a long discussion with an apparently
knowledgeable assistant about .exe files and how we intended to use the
machine, we decided on an Asus N55SL laptop - running at 3-ishGHz and
sporting an upmarket GeForce graphics card with 2GB of dedicated graphics
RAM in addition to the 4GB of ‘general’ RAM. That ought to be future-proof for
quite a few years to come. It wasn't. It wouldn't even handle HD video properly.
I suspected that it was using, by default, the cheap-and-cheerful video chip on
the motherboard, but I couldn't find any way of forcing it to use the GeForce. At
first I thought it was ‘just me’, but after a few weeks frustration during which other
WGAVG members had also drawn a blank, I contacted Terry Chamberlain.
Terry makes his living teaching computing, at the Guild, and elsewhere. "No
problem, I'll show you what to do." After a couple of hours head-scratching he
took it home, reporting a few days later that there was indeed no way of forcing
use of the good card, and that he'd found several posts complaining about this
very problem, on a discussion forum.
What you are expected to do, it would seem, is to ‘associate’ the GeForce
card with a particular piece of software then, whenever you open that software,
it runs via the Geforce card. Fine for computer games, or showing a video DVD,
but, when showing an AV sequence, you are running an .exe file. You aren't
using an identifiable piece of software. So there's nothing to associate. (Trying
to ‘associate’ the .exe file doesn't work, and in any case it would be impractical
to work this way in a typical AV day scenario.) So we seemed to be stuck.
We took the machine back to the superstore, and explained. "No problem, I'll
show you what to do." The next hour or so was quite interesting. The attitude
gradually changed from utter confidence to total bewilderment. We had virtually
the whole sales force, plus store manager, trying things and looking repeatedly
at a short ‘problem’ sequence that we'd borrowed (which runs fine on our five
year old home computer.) Eventually they conceded that they too couldn't find a
way to make it use the GeForce card. After some further negotiation, we were
offered a full refund. It had simply never occurred to me that anyone would be
daft enough to fit a computer with an upmarket graphics card and then not use
it. Surely it ought to default to the best card. Or, at the very least, there should
be a simple means of selecting it.
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