[jeffq]

I'm planning to purchase a 22" monitor ASAP. Newegg has a Hanns·G Hi-221DPB for $149 (1680x1050, free ship) and an Acer H213H for $189 (1920x1080, also free ship). One problem I didn't anticipate, until I read some of the Acer's rare negative reviews, was whether or not either of these LCDs work out-of-the-box with Windows XP (SP4).

I haven't messed with up-to-date hardware for a while, and I just assumed that a generic driver included with WinXP would work. Is this a foolish assumption? Does anyone have either of these monitors working with WinXP, and if so, are there any special tricks?

I suspect I may need to upgrade my video from mobo-built-in, so any tips on decent video cards would be nice, too. (Whatever I might switch to has to work with Ubuntu, since I'm moving off Windows soon.) I'm not looking for state-of-the-art gaming capabilities, just solid performance for ordinary tasks at the top resolutions.

Thanks for any assistance.

Jeff Q

CPU: AMD Sempron 2800+
Mobo: MSI K8MM-V
Memory: 2GB (2 x 1GB DDR)
Video: Integrated VIA K8M800-CE
Operating System: Windows XP Home SP4

[kmote]

Welcome to the forums jeffq. Monitors should just work as long as you have the right interface on your graphics card and a good enough GPU and driver. Since your graphics are integrated I will guess you have VGA in which case either of these should work.
I run both my 15.4" and 22" screens off the cheap integrated graphics on my laptop.