Mlepine,
We have been using ATI Video cards since 1994 as our sole card. The only time that we have changed was about 9 months ago for about 6 months, when we were shipping the Nvidia MX400 and testing the NVIDIA FX5200 cards. I had nothing but problems with these. The only reason that we switched to NVIDIA was as you stated, Price. The sales department wanted something cheaper, that would work. The NVIDIA did work, but you talk about problems, I have never in my life had so many Video problems, as I did with NVIDIA. This is why we switched back to ATI. I told them there was never a problem with ATI in the last 10 years of shipping them, and the last 6 months with NVIDIA was like a Nightmare.
This is why I don't recommend NVIDIA. Now I know some clients love NVIDIA and others will hate them. It is a toss up, but as to what MTU recommends it is ATI.
Which ATI card do you have that is in your Dell Inspiron 4100? Don't forget that whichever card you have, no matter what brand it is, it must beable to support DirectX 9.0 or it will not work with our software. The ATI 7000 only had drivers to support DirectX 7.1, and not 9.0.
Beavis,
As to your Post about the External Video, that is an Add On to do Dgital video creation. There is no way to make that card take the place of the chip that is built into the Laptop. Here is the website of that card that you posted about
:
http://www.snazzi.com/newsite/pages/...b2evongold.asp
Here is another one that I found, but it will do the same, run up to 4 monitors but they still require a high end video card in the system for it to work:
http://www.digitaltigers.com/sidecar.shtml
Also as George has stated if the cards are "Built by ATI" and not "Powered by ATI" there is a night and day difference. The only cards that we recommend and use are the ones that are "Built by ATI".