Seriously, guyz???

Yamikuronue

This amused me:

HardwareGeek

Chrome also reloads all your tabs when you launch it, playing all 35 youtube tabs you have open.

No, Chrome [defecates] itself if I have that many YouTube tabs open.

trithne

I spent far too long trying to find a good Speed Dial addon for FF that was near the level of Opera's. Eventually did. You wouldn't think "Can put bookmarks on it and replace thumbnails with an image" was that hard.

TwelveBaud

@asdf said:

I just need to be able to tell Windows that Mouse Button #4 is actually Mouse Button #5 and vice-versa.

That you can't do, ironically because they're "pretty standard". You need special driver software to intercept VK_XBUTTON1 and remap it to VK_XBUTTON2 and vice versa. The regular Windows driver hardcodes them.@hungrier said:

X-Mouse Button Control can do this. It also lets you scroll the window under the cursor instead of the active window.

That'll work.

Ragnax

@boomzilla said:

It's the same Dell machine. The only thing that changed is Windows. I know that you keep wanting to blame AMD and Dell, and surely something they've done has contributed, but it's clearly something MS changed that broke stuff here.

You had a driver installed that was not marked as compatible with Windows 8. Microsoft pushed their default, basic WDDM driver onto the system to guarantee at the very least that the system would start up and show the UI.

You installed the AMD/ATI drivers on top of that. The AMD/ATI drivers are incredibly fickle and you will have to jump through several hoops to get all their components to replace the default Windows ones correctly. In most cases, you must run the ATI uninstaller for the old driver to get rid of everything, change the display adapter's driver back to the "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" through Device Manager, reboot, and then reinstall the AMD/ATI package.

On top of that, you MUST download and install the complete catalyst package, because apparantly AMD/ATI just stopped shipping the OpenGL support cold with their 'driver-only' distributions somewhere some time ago.

TL;DR
It's still AMD/ATI that is TRWTF

boomzilla

@Ragnax said:

On top of that, you MUST download and install the complete catalyst package,

This is the problem. They have a version for that card that installs on 8, but not 8.1.

@Ragnax said:

It's still AMD/ATI that is TRWTF

I'm not disagreeing except to add that Microsoft was a co-conspirator in this case.

Ragnax

@boomzilla said:

This is the problem. They have a version for that card that installs on 8, but not 8.1.

Technically, you could try to locate a set of hacked drivers that allow them to install on 8.1. Unless MS actually did something as hairbrained as introducing an incompatible change in the driver model when moving from 8 to 8.1, that should work.

It's probably just the shitty AMD/ATI installer not recognizing the OS version as valid anyway. (Because god forbid they'd actually do something more sane than the OS equivalent of user agent sniffing...)

boomzilla

@Ragnax said:

Technically, you could try to locate a set of hacked drivers that allow them to install on 8.1.

The solutions I've seen say to download the Catalyst stuff, extract the drivers and find them on the disk from device manager or whatever. I just haven't had a chance to try it yet.

boomzilla

OK, I think all I had to actually do was "pick from list" and pick the one that wasn't listed with WDDM 1.1. I guess it was still on there from before the upgrade. Or it got into a place where Windows could see it from my attempts at installing Catalyst.

Either way...it's working now, despite MS's and AMD's best efforts to sabotage the machine.

FrostCat

@boomzilla said:

They have a version for that card that installs on 8, but not 8.1.

The driver model didn't change, did it? I doubt that should matter (except, of course, it probably does because AMD). But having said that, did you try running the installer in 8 compatibility mode?

boomzilla

@FrostCat said:

did you try running the installer in 8 compatibility mode?

No, that didn't occur to me.

FrostCat

@boomzilla said:

No, that didn't occur to me.

Give it a try. The worst that ~~can~~ is likely to happen is that it doesn't work.

If you really want to get it going, try cracking open the installer as you mention above, or, as I mentioned a few days ago, try to find a hacked version.