Stinky or Others, Help with Crashes ATI AIW Radeon

[presto]

I did a search and saw that Stinky seemed to know about ATI installation etc. Here is a history of my problem:

1) Purchased new Compaq Presario 8000, 512 MB RAM , 80 GB Hard Drive, AMD Athlon 1.33 GHz, Windows XP. I though I was getting a powerful system that was more than qualified to capture video.

2) Installed ATI AIW Radeon card (Box just calls it AIW Radeon, no numbers)

3) No CD was included in box (Returned Item), ATI sent me CD labled 100+DVD.

4) TV on demand never worked properly. I get small blue diamonds in a grid over the picture on playback. ATI has never heard of this and is no help. Video capture only worked at lower qualities untill I changed something. I tried a million things and for the life of me I'm not sure what fixed it but eventually I had a system that worked fairly well.

5) Everything worked fine for several months. Used MMC to record TV shows. Used AVIdub and Tmpeng to burn VCD's.

6) Upgraded to newer version of software from ATI site.

7) Crash while using Tmpeng (Blue Screen). Crash while using Premier (Blue Screen). Crash while doing nothing (Blue Screen).

8) Windows won't restart. Reformat Drive and Reload Windows. Reinstall ATI (Installed from site, I should have installed from CD and tested it for a week).

9) System Crashed while recording TV show. Will only start in Safe Mode. As an experiment I unistall ATI Drivers and MMC in control panel. System then starts fine.

10) Windows reinstalled ATI without asking me. Tried to unistall it but it kept coming back. I moved files in C/Windows/Drivercashe to another folder, unistalled ATI and restarted. Windows then reverted to VGA drivers as I had hoped. Deleted all ATI filed from computer accept some in windows/i386 in a cab file that I wasn't sure about. Deleted all ATI in Device manager. Tried to install ATI from CD but it said it needed a file form the Windows XP CD (Which I don't have) so it installed but didn't work. Went ahead and ran files from ATI site and it installed properly and works (I'm sure it will crash again).

Q1) Why can't I install ATI from the CD? Why doesn't my system act like the first time I ran the CD? (The first time I ran the CD my MMC task bar has a button for Guide +. After upgrades the button is gone and you have to use shortcut in start menu. After deleting ATI and reinstalling from CD, Guide + button is not there, so it is not a fresh install)

Q2) My card is sharing an IRQ. I've read that this is not good. I called Compaq support and they said that modern computers can share IRQ's and that it could not be changed. My card was sharing an IRQ long before the crash so I guess that isn't the problem but still I'll take any advice on this issue.

Q3) Are others having crashes with ATI and what solutions do they have? My above history makes it seem like it is clear that the crash is caused by the new ATI software but the crash didn't occur directly after the upgrade. I think it was a few days later and then it started crashing everytime.

Thanks for any help.

[mrtristan]

1. It sounds like the new drivers are bad for your system. Each time you installed them, they crashed your computer, correct?

2. Is your card AGP, or PCI? If it's a PCI card, try moving it to a different slot. I'm not sure how to change IRQs with Windows tweaks, though. My AIW currently shares IRQ#7 with my Creative sound card and I haven't had any problems.

3. I had problems with my card for the longest time. It was the ATI software that was creating conflicts with everything else. I use Ulead VideoStudio to do certain aspects of video editing. After doing many clean installs of Windows 2000, I determined that ATI was the common factor, in making my computer crash. The new drivers seem to be working fine for me, though. I'm not sure why the old drivers worked better for you.

Here is how I run my computer, if it's of any help.

1. Did a clean install of Win2k Pro.

2. Installed most recent ATI video drivers.

3. Installed only ATI DVD.

4. Installed MMC 7.1, with only the tv option selected. I left out all the other software, just to be safe. I read somewhere that ATI Fileplayer is the culprit.

5. Installed Ulead VideoStudio.

6. Installed patches for VS.

This process of installation worked for me. The ATI MMC software was causing conflicts with Windows Media Player and VideoStudio, until I figured how to install everything for my particular system. I'm really no expert on the subject. This is just what worked for me.

Since then, I've upgraded software and drivers, with no problems.

Here's some extra tips.

Always uninstall the old drivers, before installing the new ones. I'm not sure if you were already doing so, from your post. If you just go ahead and install over the old drivers, you can sometimes get a bad mix of old and new drivers, which can cause major problems. (I haven't just read about this. Personal experience.)

I also reboot for each component that I uninstall. You can probably do it all at once and reboot once, but I do this just to be safe.

Here's the tricky part. When you uninstall the ATI video drivers, it will try to automatically reinstall them for you, upon rebooting. The files that it needs are usually stored in c:\ati or something like that. It should be relatively easy to find. Be sure to delete this entire folder, BEFORE you reboot. If not, you'll end up having the driver that you just got rid of come back to haunt you.

There is a way to do a completely clean install of the drivers, but I'm too lazy to figure it out. Despite the write ups on the web that I've found, it's easier to do it the way I just described. It may not be the best way, but it works for me. That's what matters.

All in all, ATI is known for putting out crappy drivers. Since XP is still relatively new, a lot of your problems are probably related to some kind of driver bug. The next release might fix it, or it might not.