I primarily use Nvidia video cards in my systems but Nvidia alas, has been a tad disappointing lately. First, they took away nView, their desktop manager utility in Windows Vista & 7 along with ditching horizontal and vertical span modes across multiple monitors. More recently they started melting people’s video cards with their 196.75 driver release but since I don’t upgrade to new drivers right away, my cards are in their original unmelted, functioning state.

While I can’t do anything about their lack of skill or desire to put back horizontal and vertical span mode in Vista & Windows 7 (ATI sucks too on this), I can do something about the other two disappointments from Nvidia:

1. How Not to Melt Your Nvidia Graphics Card 101: DON’T IMMEDIATELY UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VIDEO DRIVERS! Let other suckers do that and find out what broke as the results and their tears pour in! (This wisdom holds true no matter whose brand of video card you use.)

2. I like Nvidia’s Desktop Managing software for it’s ability to allow you to run virtual desktops, assign hotkeys for certain graphics options and giving you the ability to manage windows, pop-ups and dialog boxes across multiple monitors. I missed nView in Vista & 7 and was looking for an alternative now that stupid doody-headed Nvidia stopped supporting it in current operating systems. Doody-heads! You hear my Nvidia, you’re a bunch of doody-heads!

Turns out I didn’t need an alternative to nView after all. Seems the sneaky buggers over at Nvidia just stopped the program from installing on Vista & Windows 7 when you installed their drivers. It’s still there and perfectly installable if you know how to do it manually. All you have to do is the follow these instructions:

To make NVIDIA nView Desktop Manager work on Windows Vista/7:

1 - Open the latest Drivers for your card from Nvidia’s website.
2 - Using either WinRAR or 7-Zip open the driver file and extract the nview.CAB file to your desktop.
3 - Open the nview.cab file with WinRAR or 7-Zip and extract all the files into a folder on your desktop
4 - Run the nviewsetup.exe file as normal.
5 - nView Desktop Manager is now installed. You can go to the Control Panel and in Appearances and Personalization the NVIDIA nView Desktop Manager will be there now. You can click it and then enable it. Unfortunately there is no system tray icon for nView anymore but once you activate it all you have to do is right click and empty space on your desktop and you’ll see the nView Desktops option.

And Viola! You’re done. just like that nView is back! Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll have to try doing my part for that spanning thing.

Hey NVIDIA! Yeah, you. I’m talking to you! Bring back vertical and horizontal spanning mode and stop blaming it on Microsoft. You’re a video card company that’s supposed to know how to make a video card work right no matter the OS! Bring back vertical and horizontal span mode in Vista and 7 and stop being doody-heads about it! And don’t say ATI can’t do it too as a selling point for lower expectations. Oh yeah and while you’re at it stop melting people’s graphic cards ya doody-heads!!!

There, I tried. Take that doody-heads!