Problems with Radeon 9700 Pro and Windows XP ?
Posted by: Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 07/30/2011 09:04 PM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]
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.
Author: Infinity7