Just a quick rant about the state of ATI's video drivers before I call it a night.

Sleep mode isn't working, not even from hibernate. These are basic computer functions - a graphics driver should not be hanging the resume process. How did the 7.9 drivers get approved for release in this state?

This isn't the only problem I've been putting up with, since the 7.4 drivers I've had to deal with washed out colours. I had been using the 7.3 drivers up until I decided to have a shot at the new ones again. To get around the washed out colours I'm forced to install the Catalyst Control Centre, so I can change the colour profile. This goes against my standard practice of just installing the video drivers on their own using the Device Manager.

ATI were nailing solid driver releases for so long and now this. People should not have to worry about such basic things not working properly. Come on, S3 Suspend (with data placed in the hibernate file if power loss occurs) is the default setting for the power button in Windows Vista.

Sort it out.

So as I mentioned in a previous entry I've started using nVidia's Vista drivers instead of their XP ones on my Tablet.

This is with the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), which takes advantage of Windows Vista's capabilities. One of those capabilities is running drivers in user mode instead of kernel mode, even the video driver.

In a previous operating system this crash would of brought down the whole system with a blue screen, but Windows detected the driver had stopped responding, shut down the video driver and restarted it, all within the space of about a second.

It does however mean I'm still waiting for better nVidia drivers.