Third Party Drivers

Happy February, guys. Happy Super Bowl XLIII.

I relegated my roommate's Toshiba Satellite A135-S4656 to XP. It originally came with Vista Basic and 512MB of RAM, the combination of which would explain the sluggish performance he's been experiencing. I didn't even know they still made laptops with just 512MB of RAM.

Turns out Toshiba doesn't support XP on their laptops. So remote was this possibility to me that I didn't make sure that Toshiba had XP drivers on their website beforehand. What began so smoothly turned into a three-day burden. I actually considered putting Vista back on it for a while.

Of course, everybody knows that you can't go scouring the web looking for 3rd party drivers without first hitting up OmegaDrivers.net. Omega Drivers is a huge deal and has been lauded by ATi's own Terry Makedon as "the best alternative drivers on the Internet."

It was less the quality of the software as it was the character of Omega's founder, Angel Trinidad, that caught my attention while browsing. Angel created Omega Drivers in 2004 as a way to give graphics enthusiasts options to get more out of their video cards. Though he does accept donations, the drivers are free to whomever would like them.

His official explanation in regards to motives is "I only serve Jesus and His will, that's why I do this service in my spare time, I want to leave a mark in the world and let Him know that I did something good and noble for the world... make people happy ;-)"

There's something about a guy who buys into the Open Source mentality and Jesus that I find inspiring. So, a tip of the hat to you, Angel. Hope that your wife has been enjoying greatly improved health.

-Ryan