Constant device failure with ATI Cat. 3.1

[Aretè]

Okay i have NO idea what this is, i have completely exhausted myself trying to fix this problem since the 3.1 have been released and now i have finally thrown up my arms in despair and hoping someone have get my butt out of the fire.

Ill be browsing the internet and EVERYTHING locks up, then the screen flickers and teh aall the colors are messed up and it tells me i have a device failure. That is the most frequent problem. Now sometimes the computer wont even load up all the way, it will either freeze while trying to load up windows or it will load up windows, ill log in and then it locks up and gives me a device failure. I have no idea what to do i have tried everything, and i mean everything.

Any help. Please.

P.S.



The file that constantly crashes is ati2dvag.dll

Iv tried the 'noob' guide over at driverheavern even though i really am not a noob to hardware i was just desperate. Iv got reg cleaner and drivercleaner, and nothing is working. It is like it has just gone corrupt, i uninstalled everything, searched for the file so i could delete, but im getting nothing. Now the problems have escalated, it doesnt even boot up now, it does the windows xp with the status bar loading, then it flashes and locks up. If it does boot up, literally five minutes after just letting it sit idle on the desktop the screen will flash and i will get a device error. It happens faster if i try to do something on my computer, like browse the wb or start an application. Its like something is suddenly causing a problem, if someone could help i would really really appreicaite right about now.

 

[jroc]

Can you even boot into safemode...if you can..then you might go to the device manager and use the roll back feature on the driver...and roll back to the previous one...also are you running the DirectX 9.0

 

[Aretè]

Yeah, you cant even properly run the new cats without using DX 9.0 but here is the thing, i dont want to have to roll back, i fixed this problem before, but now its come back and ic ant seem to get rid of it.

my specs are


asus p4t533-c
windows xp corp sp1
radeon 9700 pro

I dunno if that will help or not, knowing that crap sure hasnt helped me thats for sure lol. I really do not know what to do, i dont want to rollback because then i lose a lot of performance, esp dont want to rollback knowing i fixed this problem before. so ill try everything under the sun i hav emissed to fix this problem swithout formatting/rolling back

 

[Howling Wolf]

Maybe you should reinstall SP1 ?
It's worth the try, no ?
I'm thinking of something else, IE might be corrupted and XP relies a lot on it I think...reinstall SP1 and see...
Hope this help !

 

[Eck]

Disable fastwrites in SmartGART. Fixed it for me.

There are a few threads on it over at the Rage3D forums.

 

[Krux]

you say u will loose performance if u roll back.... how? if your computer only works for 5 minute at a time how do u stand to loose performance?

 

[Geffy]

did you remove the previous set of drivers and ATi control panel before installing the new drivers and new control panel

 

[Sazar]

the driver error you are getting is sometimes caused by conflicts between a pci device and the agp device...

you may want to try moving pci devices to different slots and see if this alleviates the problem...