That worked very good, thanks!

I've got 4 PCs all running Nvidia cards ranging from a TNT2 32MB to a new Geforce 7900GT and I've only ever had one hardware problem, the fan seized up on a FX5200 which was causing it to overheat obviously. I've got a mate who runs a local LAN that's pretty big, they usually get around 200 people and he is a Nvidia man because he's sees that many computers and noone ever has any problems with their Nvidia card.

On the driver side of things, the nv driver isn't accelerated at all. That means when you're watching DVDs, playing the odd game etc all the rendering is being done by your CPU which kind of makes the graphics card a very expensive VGA port. Nvidia has very good proprietary drivers which enable full 3D acceleration and you can use your video card to decode videos as well with libXvMCNVIDIA which a little mucking around.

I've never had to reinstall the nvidia driver for an Xorg upgrade, kernel updates yes because it just needs to rebuild the kernel module but this shouldn't apply to Xorg unless paths change or something.

Thanks for the reply cs-cam. And I apologize for my poor memory. You are right. It was when upgraded the kernel, that I would have to reinstall these drivers. Interesting about everyone's success with the hardware. Even the best Cigar companies give you one that unravels now and then;-) I tend to keep my hardware for a long time, so maybe I'm being too harsh on nvidia. I had one card that actually lasted close to 5 years by the time I burned it up.

I wanted to point out that I did tests with my nvidia cards. An example was an 800MHz Pentium III. I had the experience you describe by using the vesa framebuffer driver but not the nv. Vesa would bury the CPU (as expected) and video would still be unwatchably choppy. With the nv driver, barely any CPU was used and the movie would be as smooth as glass. I never did a thing with 3d stuff though. I don't play games so I never pursued anything more than being able to watch a movie or have smooth scrolling in my development environment. I guess that's why I didn't appreciate the proprietary driver. I just wasn't using it the way you guys are.

Thanks for jumping in and helping us.

I was wrong, the nv driver does do 2D acceleration it appears. That actually nice to know and in which case if 3D acceleration isn't required, the nv driver would be fine to use

Very true, the FX5200 that died on me did so when it was only about 8 months old. I just assumed that statistically there has to be a bad card come from the factory sometimes and I just got one. I couldn't be happier with my other Nvidia products though so I'm still a happy customer