serg1958

Hi! Can someone help me? I've got a PIII @733MHz, 256M sdram, some pretty old material (Jul2000) but running quite well under XP SP2. It had a riva tnt2 32M, but it can't run some of the newest games (e.g. rollercoaster tycoon3). so, i've bought a radeon 9550 128M and got it installed with the drivers that came with the board. now, the problems: the system is very slow, computer keeps freezing (stop and goes all the times), sometimes it restarts, sometimes "recovers form serious errors", sometimes gives a "nice blue screen" with some kind of dump and problems reported on ati2dvag however, it doesn't give (almost) any error while playing RCT3. I have MUCH more problems while doing some normal things like using outlook, word, explorer, etc. I looked at the "CPU usage" and noticed lots of peaks, and a average usage of 50% while doing "nothing" (i.e. just looking at the task manager...) So, that's what i've tried: 1. downloaded catalyst 5.2 2. removed ati drivers with add/remove 3. restarted computer 4. updated drivers using the install program from ati 5. restarted computer... ang got the same problems So, I unistalled the drivers again, and currently i'm working with default drivers (Standart vga mode?), no problem whatsoever with outlook, word, excel, explorer, etc,... and NO RCT3... The guys from the store told me to try installing the windows framework (is it the .net framework?) and the other catalyst 5.2. (the one that requires it). I didn't try it yet, because it does not make sense to me, and i'm not sure about the framework thing... Any ideas?

Well, finally I tried again. Downloaded .net framework downloaded catalyst 5.2. control center installed it all. restarted the computer... and there it went again: cpu usage always over 50%, and mostly around 100% (freeze...) while doing "nothing" (only task manager) I didn't wait until ati2dvag gives problems, but the sympthoms are the same as before. so, I unistalled the lot, and here I am, able to use the machine again... any suggestions?

I checked the bios: it has agp-4x enabled. it also has: agp aperture size: 64M agp driving control: auto agp fastwrite: disabled should i have a different aperture size? or anything else different?

I'll give it a try... and post the result later. All I can say about my M/B is this description: M/B 586, azza via-694 p133 (came with receipt when bought)