Problems with Radeon 9700 Pro and Windows XP ?

On machines with the 9700 Pro card & running Windows XP

Symptoms:

After a system lockup or freeze during a game, or software installation, or Windows defrag, Windows gives a blue screen error mentioning IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL and Windows says it has recovered from a serious error and wants to send info to Microsoft. Details say that a minidump has occured. Following this error, anytime you attempt to defrag your hard drive you again get the blue screen error.

Cause:

Somehow your Windows Profile got messed up or corrupted or not saved properly to the hard drive. Apparently a form of the Infinite Loop type messup.

Quick Solution:

1) Reboot your system.
2) Go into the User Accounts section of the Control Panel.
3) Create a New User Acoount with a completely different name and be sure that the new account has Administrator privileges.
4) Reboot Windows and at the logon screen choose to log on with the New User Account you just set up.
5) Go START/RUN and type CHKDSK in the box and click OK.
6) CheckDisk will run and you may observe that at the end of its run that is finding some files it does not like and it automatically deletes them.
7) At this point Windows is now fixed and you may now reboot and logon to Windows under your regular name. You also may now go delete that New User Account you had set up to do this fix.

It is not necessary to remove any ATI drivers or reinstall anything.

I have further discovered that you may reduce the tendency for your machine to go thru these type symptoms by disabling Write Combining.

Microsoft has this to say regarding the infinite loop lockup:

This issue can occur when the display driver is caught in an infinite loop, typically waiting for the video hardware to become idle. This usually indicates a problem with the video hardware or with the display driver not being able to program the hardware correctly.

To work around this issue:
Click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Display.
On the Settings tab, click Advanced, and then click the Troubleshoot tab.
Move the Hardware Acceleration slider to None, and then click to clear the Enable Write Combining check box.
Click OK, and then click OK.

NOTE: This procedure prevents the display driver from programming the hardware incorrectly, but results in a loss of some display functionality and performance. Although you can increase the hardware acceleration settings to a point above None to regain functionality and performance, this increases the chances of the issue reoccurring. For maximum stability, leave hardware acceleration off.

[end of Microsoft info and the following are my notes]

I have disabled Write Combining on my machine and have found no performance loss in games so far. I did NOT lower any hardware acceleration as yet. That may not be necessary.

I have had this 9700 Pro awhile and have found some problems with both the driver on the CD and also the drivers on the ATI web page. The best thing to use is the 7.77 drivers found at www.guru3d.com . They are also at ATI, hidden, but it is a slow download there. You should know that, it is *very important* that you first remove all mention of any previous drivers before
installing these 7.77 drivers. Do not skip this step. If you do not remove previous drivers you may find that it runs great for a while, then later slows way way down to sluggish speed. Its filename ends with the numbers 6178 by the way. The correct uninstall procedure for this is not the normal one I'd been used to. The following procedure to remove all mention of previous ATI drivers was sent to me by ATI support and here it is:

1. Boot into safe mode (hold down shift or press F8 during bootup)
2. Once in safe mode, right-click on My Computer, then click Properties, then Hardware
3. Go to Device Manager, and open Display Adapters
4. Remove any items under Display Adapters
5. Open Control Panel, then go to Add/Remove Programs
6. Remove ATI Multimedia Center, and any ATI entries other than ATI Display Driver
7. Open Device Manager, and remove any ATI drivers under Sound, Video and Game Controllers
8. Delete the folders C:\ati and C:\Program Files\ATI Multimedia
9. Click Start, then Run
10. Type Regedit and click Ok
11. Click Registry and export the Registry to a file, so as to back it up
12. Open the folder HKEY_CURRENT_USER, open Software and remove any ATI entries
13. Open the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, open Software and remove any ATI entries
14. Close any open windows and reboot
15. Once in Windows, install the ATI drivers and software

[This ends the part from ATI and the following are my notes again]

Also the correct procedure for installing drivers is the following according to Intel, with the exception of my note on step 3.

1) First install Windows
2) Install Windows Updates and patches
3) Install Motherboard Chipset Drivers (also I install the Application Accelerator at this point)
4) Install other device drivers; video card, sound card, etc.
5) Install DirectX.

So, before you installing those new driver u must be booted up in SVGA mode. Before installing any new Intel or VIA chipset drivers be sure be running in standard VGA mode too, then install your video drivers after a reboot.

Anyway, doing all of the above made it work great on my machine, whereas trying other things and drivers had made it fail before, in some way or another. I had previously had problems with Delayed Write Failed or Windows not finding some of my personal settings files on bootup, after which Windows would be messed up. It is now performing fast and stable. Click on the Compatibility Options button in the OpenGL tab and enable those two things in there to make it work good for Battlefield 1942. FPS is also very good now in Soldier of Fortune 2 and also Unreal Tournament 2003 demo and Giants Citizen Kabuto. FPS exceeds that which was possible with the Xtasy Visiontek GF4 Ti4600 128mb card for every game tried.