I couldn't find any passively-cooled low-profile cards. The problem was that it wasn't passively cooled, and I was extremely leery of adding anything to the computer that made it noisier. It was passively cooled, so no extra noise was added to the machine, but unfortunately it had a tendency to crash Vista with a blue screen of death - which, incidently, is a very hard thing to with the way Vista handles video drivers.Ī few weeks ago I decided I needed to fix this crashing problem - and no amount of software tweaking seemed to work - so I pulled out the old video card and put in a new NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS. On the Slimline, I had to find a low-profile video card, which ended up being an old NVIDIA 6200 I had laying around. On a full-sized computer, it's easy enough to solve the problem by installing a new graphics card. Plugging in the 22' monitor, I saw what I expected to see: swirly distortions and general fuziness that goes hand in hand with running an analog display port at high resolutions. The problem? The Slimline computer only came with a VGA port! I can't fathom what HP was thinking with that decision - even if they wanted to target consumers who are using analog-only monitors, they can solve that problem with a DVI to VGA adaptor. I'm particularly irritated by this issue because last year I bought an HP Slimline computer for my wife, along with an HP w2207 LCD monitor (a 22' monitor running at 1680 x 1050). The Dell has the advantage of an HDMI port, which can be converted to a DVI port, but it would seem prudent to keep that HDMI port for other things. Why won't companies let this connector die? DVI should be the standard monitor connector on every computer out there, and if you need to down-convert to a VGA connector, it's easy to do do with a cheap adaptor. Are you ready for a rant? Here goes: Dell has launched a computer model called the Dell Studio Slim Desktop PC last week, and one of the first things I noticed about it is that it has a VGA port.

Vga to dvi converter died