Stretch. A Nightmare with Graphics Cards.

Heel Stretch, originally uploaded by odie1049.

This fella is nice 'n' stretchy. My display is stretched but there is nothing nice about it.

It's a long and tedious journey though device settings, bios and graphics cards and I can't see the light.

I thought I had it sussed in my last post. How ridiculous that now seems. I noticed there was no 3D capability. Ran DxDiag and this was confirmed.

I read that the 7.11 ATI driver lacked AGP support. Suggestion was to go back to 7.7. Nice and stable. I have no idea why I thought this suggestion was sound .

I uninstalled 7.11 and ran cleaner.net. Reboot. No display. Things went down hill from there. Believe me I tried a lot.

Ended up with not being able to complete the boot up. Ran XP repair and it didn't.

Resigned to this failure and went out to the local PC supply chain and purchased a new HD. Back home. Fitted new HD as master and existing HD master became slave. Installed XP on new master. Progress.

Old master is visible and healthy. I am able to access all files. Run F.A.S.T. (hah! Big joke that). The whole process takes an age. Tells me it's completed. I press finish and... either I'm missing something (I hope) or fuck all happened.

The position now is I am running on new install of XP with access to all files on the old master disc. I've partitioned the XP install on the new master to help avoid the need for a new HD if I ever find myself with that as a solution again. The resolution though is fucked once more. Can't get wide screen. Can't reinstall the graphics drivers

Bollocks. Going to have to reinstall lots of applications and set things up again from the ground up.

Many settings and software keys are sorted. Lightroom catalogues are intact. My email is being difficult. Can't get access to the IDs for my server. Forgotten my WordPress password and can't access the email where the reset passwords are sent.

I am in a PC mess. A road crash. I hate ATI and I especially hate the 9800SE graphics cards and their poxy drivers. If you have any advice it's welcome.

edit - I remembered the WP login details.