Daily Archives: January 30, 2007

software development, windows

Free WPF datagrid control from Xceed

A notable omission from the controls available in the first release of Windows Presentation Foundation is a datagrid. Component vendor XCeed has stepped up with a free WPF datagrid. Registration is required, but Xceed says:

The free license is a perpetual license and includes royalty-free distribution, bugfixes, and new features, so your company can use it with full confidence.

Paying customers get support along with an option for source code.

I’ve not tried the control yet, but if you are experimenting with WPF, it strikes me as worth a look.

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Uncategorized

Intel: don’t bother us with bug reports

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Intel’s production graphics driver for the 945GM chipset on Windows Vista has some bugs. I thought I should report this to Intel. Trouble is, you can’t. At least, the “Contact support” options here don’t tell you how, not unless you are signed up as an Intel reseller or partner. Nor does the general contact information page give any clues. Intel would like my pre-sales questions, or my website feedback, or any number of non-technical enquiries, but bugs? Forget it.

Can it really be that Intel gives you no way to report a bug? I dialed the support number. Note: I am now paying for this call. I explained to the support person that I wanted to report a bug in the Vista driver for the 945GM chipset. He said he was sorry, but the support line was only for Intel boxed product. Even though I had downloaded the driver from Intel’s site, my bug report should go to Toshiba.

Clearly I could report it to Toshiba – perhaps I will – but will the feedback ever thread its way back to Intel? Who knows.

By the way, I get the same bug with the slightly older driver on offer on Toshiba’s site for this laptop. Further, the same hardware is stable in Windows XP, which suggests that the problem lies with Intel’s driver, or conceivably in Vista, rather than than in the hardware.

Bottom line: there is no way for an end user to report a bug to Intel. I think that’s silly.

Update

Toshiba won’t accept the bug report either. Reason: the driver was downloaded from Intel’s site. Nor will they accept the bug report on the older driver downloaded from Toshiba. Reason: it is a US site and my machine is UK. Maybe if I would care to wait until I can download the same driver from the UK site, it might take some interest. Frustrating.

Further update

Ah, there is a way (sort-of). You go to this page, and complete the form. The only link I can find to the form is via the form for website feedback. So you complete the form, and the bot emails you a bunch of links to articles. At the bottom of the email is an “escalate” button which claims to “escalate your question to a technical support representative.” I’ll keep you posted…

 

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windows

Vista display driver takes a break

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I’m seeing an annoying error on my Portege M400 running Vista. The thing is almost clear of beta drivers now, after numerous downloads from Toshiba, including the display driver. The graphics chipset is a Mobile Intel 945GM, and I have a production release driver dated 13th December 2006, version 7.14.10.1151, though I saw the same problem with earlier releases.

Specifically, from time to time the display blanks out and an error 4101 is logged. Sometimes I get this supposedly reassuring toast pop-up:

The warning message is:

Display driver igfx stopped responding and has successfully recovered

The error is worse than it sounds. The screen blanking is irritating, and sometimes causes the current application to crash (I’ve seen this with games). I’ve also seen it when working with multiple displays. Fortunately it only seems to occur with the display is being stressed in some way – I can work all day in Word and Excel, and not see the problem.

I’ve tried turning off Aero and it makes no difference.

A bug in Intel’s driver I suppose (I never get this on my Vista desktop), though it is not exclusive to Intel; this user reports the same problem with a GeForce 7900.

This is the kind of thing that spoils Vista right now. I think this OS will work much better six months from now.

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