Just to continue documenting the details of my homebrew upgrade, I fixed one of the previous unresolved areas - Google Earth now works again!

For New Year's Santa brought a new Dell 37" LCD TV ;-).  Not only is the size wonderful, but it can be clearly driven as a monitor at 1280x768, making reading of text and web pages, not to mention photos, work!  And the clarity of DVDs is amazing compared to the two-decade old Sony.

However, I did have a little bit of strange behavior when driving dual monitors off my single display adapter when one is VGA and one is DVI (through an HDMI adapter), instead of VGA and SVideo.  When waking from sleep, the secondary display doesn't come on.  Sometimes it seems to get confused which monitor is which, and it takes some fiddling with the display control panel to get the display back up.  So I thought I'd try updating the video drivers.

I first found and tried to install a newly released version of the Catalyst drivers (5.13) from the ATI web site, but the install failed, complaining about a corrupt or missing video driver.  So after reverting to a system restore checkpoint (how cool is that anyway?) I then installed the drivers recommended by Windows Update (which I previously found to be incompatible with the Media Center functionality), and then redid the Catalyst install.  Media Center seems to be working fine, and I haven't yet seen any recurrence of the snooze problem(time will tell if it really is fixed), but the reinstall did allow Google Earth to start working again!