About Chris Morrison Expertise Installation of cards. Difference between card types. What card is best for your purpose. Driver problems. All video issues.
Experience 15 years experience with building, repairing and upgrading PCs. Technical support experience.
Organizations Help on the Net
Education/Credentials Associates Degree in Information Technology
A Certified
Expert: Chris Morrison Date: 7/9/2008 Subject: ATI 1900 video card and error messages
Question I have an ATI 1900 card. It came with a Dell XPS 400. I had an NVDIA card before but this is a 512 mmg card and it is supposed to be really great. I have had nothing but problems with it. I get a constant ati2mtag error in my Event Log and I have spinning on Half Life 2 all the episodes and the main game, spinning on Bioshock, crashes on a game called Overclocked and major crashes on a game called Culpa Innata. I finally found a patch for them and they wrote that some cards were having bad problems with some of their code. I loaded and unloaded the drivers three times. I have been online with Dell about 3 times, wrote to ATI three times. All ATI can say is that Dell tweaks hardware to suit their needs and increase performance and so there is nothing they can do because the drivers will be unstable. I just don't know what is wrong with it other than some conflict with the motherboard. I read that you can have that. Please help someone. Thanks
Answer First thing you want to do is go to ATIs website and download the newest drivers for the card. Don't install it.
Then you want to go to device manager (right click my computer and choose manage). Expand display adapters and right click your ATI card. Choose uninstall. If there is another card listed, right click it and choose disable.
Now go to the control panel and open add remove programs. Uninstall any ati software. If there is any Nvidia software still listed make sure you uninstall that too.
This process will remove the drivers completely. Reinstalling drivers without doing this sometimes just updates certain files, not the whole driver.
Reboot the computer. Cancel the windows device wizard. Now install the new driver you downloaded and reboot. Check the games again.
Make sure you have direct x 9c for XP and 10 for vista.
