Driver Install Problem

[xChris]

I just got a new Dell with a PCIe motherboard. It came with a Radeon x300se card. I purchased an x600xt card (I wanted an x800 but not available retail yet for PCIe). I have a question and a problem, I'm hoping someone can help me.

Question: The card is made by MSI. However, I didn't use the MSI drivers, I got the latest Catalyst drivers from the Radeon site and used those instead. Was this a mistake? Should I be using the MSI drivers?

Problem: The Catalyst drivers say to uninstall your current drivers, restart your computer, then install the Catalyst drivers. However, when I do this my computer automatically detects the video card and installs a driver for it. An ATI driver appears in the "Add/Remove programs" section of the control panel. How can I stop Windows (XP Home) from automatically installing drivers when it starts? If I install the Catalyst drivers it seems to install okay anyway, but I don't know if that's right. Flight Simulator works great, but I tried a program called VertiSim and the graphics are choppy. VertiSim uses OpenGL, so maybe that's the problem, but it ran perfectly smooth on my old computer, a P1.7 with a 9800 Pro.

 

[selfbuilt]

This is a common problem (XP detecting the old drivers and automatically re-installing). You get download any of a number of driver cleaner programs (even ATI has a tool on its website, but I've never tried it). Personally. I wouldn't worry about it much .... installing the new drivers once windows has re-loaded has always worked fine for me (and yes, stick with the latest ATI catalysts).

I suspect your problem stems for the X300se ... that's going to be really slow (i.e. 9200-ish speeds). The x600XT would have been better, but even that is unlikely to rival your old 9800Pro.

 

[JackHawksmoor]

I just ordered a Dell with that video card. Obviously I'm going to replace it with a Geforce 6800 GT when those are available, but the x300 looks like it's not as bad as I first thought. It's a PCIe version of a Radeon 9600 NP.

 

[Sylvanas]

driver cleaner

 

[xChris]

Thanks for the replies guys. I would think there would be some setting burried in Windows XP somewhere that would disable the automatic loading of drivers but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, the method I used seems to work.

What do you think of my using the ATI Catalyst drivers instead of using the MSI supplied drivers?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Chris

What do you think of my using the ATI Catalyst drivers instead of using the MSI supplied drivers?

the reference ati drivers are more uptodate than the supplied msi drivers