Following up on the BIOS story: Yesterday, before installing the ATI card, I went into the BIOS to disable the primary (onboard) SiS video adapter to find out that the Primary Video Card setting was already set to PCI [instead of the expected “AGP/OnBoard”]). This struck me as odd: after all the computer doesn’t have an ‘onboard PCI video adapter’ (on the SR1320NX there are three PCI slots and one is taken by the modem [hardware: imagine that!]). Naturally, after installation of the new card, Windows merrily detected that there were two available video cards.
So, this makes me conclude that BIOS and motherboard builders (this one is a Phoenix, rev. 3.04 10/19/04) have settled on the idea of having multiple graphic adapters enabled because recently all OS-es have support for the use of multiple monitors (if I’m not wrong, Windows 2000 was the first Windows OS that did this without any real problems). The only way to actually turn off the onboard adapter seems to be to touch it with my statically charged fingers. ZZzap.
Don’t you dare me.
CRAP. I FORGOT TO PUT THE CLOCKS AN HOUR AHEAD. I’M SO GOING TO BE FRIED TOAST.