f13.net

[whine]
Whoever told me fixing my drivers would only take 15 minutes, you were close - only off by 11 hours and change.  I spent 12 hours intermitently working on my driver issue, trying to solve the crashes that have been plaguing my otherwise pleasant stay in CoH.  Managed to break my entire system for about 8 hours of that time period, due to a missing file that neither WinXP, ATI's driver program, or the Omega driver program could put a name to.

Got into CoH and played for a half hour before getting stuck with an uncompletable Kill 10 and 2 unplayably frontloaded instanced missions, acruing a bar worth of debt, and brekaing the bank for 2 DOs I can't use for another level.

In short, life is teh suck.
[/whine]

Hopefully, tomorrow XP gets reinstalled from scratch.  Wish me luck, and a pox on Bill Gates and whomever writes ATI's drivers.

heh, gimp

Hehe. Well that just caught me up short from ordering the Radeon 9800 Pro :) What went wrong?

Remember I'm one person with a problem only, most other ATI users here are having no problem.  If you do get a Radeon, go strait for the newest Omega drivers, or the official 4.1s.  It looks like my first upgrade from 3.whatever to 4.whatever 2 months or so ago is what started the whole chain of events.

Yeah, that has practically been ATi's nemesis since day one.  Rock solid ass kicking hardware.....a drivers team that probably designs software for Satan to torture computer geeks with when they die....

My standard operating prociedure for dealing with ATi drivers issues has usually been to format the harddrive and reinstall from scratch about every .5 version update.

Which is actually a good thing, considering that you usually go through a .5 update about every 6 months and windows is such a piece of shit at clearing junk out of your system when you install/uninstall frequently that a clean install every 6 months is usually a good idea anyhow.

Gives me a reason to keep up on building my customized windows install dvds.

My computer at work is using an ATI Radeon 9500 with I think 4.3 or 4.4 drivers. I had some issues on it when I first got the beta (was on driver version 3.7 or something), but once I went to 4.3, no problems whatsoever.

Update the Second:

I tried doing a full reinstall of Windows, this last friday night.  Naturally Windows fucked up its job, and merely emptied and rewrote a few system files and called it a fresh install.  Stupid Windows.

Right now my computer, the very same one I am typing from, is having its harddrive rewritten to null by Knoppix while I comfortably surf the internet.  Long Live linux!  (strangely it even recognizes and autoconfiged my optical wireless MICROSOFT brand mouse to work properly without any work on my part)

Well wish me luck on my reinstall.  And a pox on Bill Gates.  Hell I'll toss in a verneral disease free of charge.

If you don't type "format c:" or select "Format C:" during your install, it is not a reinstall. That's just Microsoft trying to send you to their tech support line.

I'd be more safe and "fdisk /mbr" then "fdisk" the drive too.

How have I missed fdisk /mbr switch all these years? Man, I could've used that knowledge a decade ago, lol. But fdisk and format are two commands I teach all my 'customers' (in quotes because I don't consider building computers for friends and family a 'business').