ATI's upgrade program. Anyone understand it?

[presto]

ATI has an upgrade program but I am confused. For one thing if you look at the form it is not clear to me what price you pay. It looks like you pay 350.00 but that seems like too much. It also lists 50 dollars at another point but they might be refering to a rebate that is available.

Another point of confusion is what version I have. The box just says All-In-Wonder Raedon. When I look at the ATI prices on the site I don't see that listed.

If my All-In-Wonder Raedon is causing my system to crash it is possible that a different card from ATI will work fine? Is this upgrade offer a good thing?

[Ryan]

I have also looked at their upgrade policy, forms, etc. In my opinion the upgrade price is overpriced especially considering that you have to send in your old graphics card. I was able to find prices cheapoer than their upgrade prices using yahoo, amazon, etc.

[Bstansbury]

Ryan,

I don't think that you ATI All in Wonder Radeon card is what is causing your system to crash. It has to be some other software, unless of course there is something really wrong with your card.

I would first suspect the video driver. I have the AIW Radeon AGP card and I had trouble until I got the latest video drivers and MMC 7.5 off the net and installed them. Any capture card is very sensitive to the drivers that are installed as well as the Windows operating system.

Add some more information to your post that tell us what kind of system you have, what kind of software you have installed, and what video source are you trying to capture and in what res, speed, etc.

One last suggestion. Do some indepth reading about video and Capturing. I have posted a guide in the "Users Guides" section of this forum,... called "How to tune you system for ATI cards",.. Hope this helps

Bud

[presto]

BStansbury,
I read your article and it was very helpful.

I removed the ATI drivers (which was not easy) and installed the old ATI drivers that I have on CD. Now everything seems to work fine. Funny that I seem to have trouble with the new drivers while others have the opposite experience.

I still get frames dropping. About 30 frames in 20 minutes. I am going to continue to tune my system and may get back to you for more help.

You guys who write articles and reply to posts don't get enough thanks. ATI provides very little support. Wouldn't it be nice if they provided a program that removed all traces of the ATI drivers and MMC so that you could do a clean install?

[Bstansbury]

Presto,

I saw a post on the forum somewhere that was very detailed about how to install and/or remove ATI software. I have a copy of it on my system and if you want me to send it too you, send me an e-mail.

Also, I remove ATI stuff a different way,... I use "Regedit" to edit the "Registry", which is all dangerous and therefore I back it up first, and search the entire registry and remove anything that has an ATI label.

Bud

[Greg12]

ati doesn't put enough security into there installer

i installed MMC 7.5 on my system which has an NVIDA GeoForce GO

all it said was "warning, no ATI card detected."

Everything else worked fine.