ColonelUltra

Hello.

Ive had troubles with my graphics board for quite a while now, I'll start with my system specs and then the description of the problem and its history:

I'm using an Acer Aspire 1350,
Mobility AMD Athlon 2800+
Radeon Mobility 9700 (64MB, 446MHz/223MHz Core/RAM clocks)
768 MB Ram (upgraded from 256)
Windows XP Pro
80GB hdd
DirectX 9.0c


The laptop is fairly old, but always ran smoothly.
Then, around Octobre, the harddisk I had back then kept screwing up, and I decided to get a new one for Christmas, as the problems kept reoccuring after several formats/reinstallations. So I exchanged the old 60GB for a new 80GB, ig that's of any relevance. At the same time a added another 512 MB ram to my meager 256.

Everything went fine for some time, but after approximately 6-8 weeks, my PC would often freeze or give me a bluescreen , when I was in Windows environment.
Note that I am not aware of any change I made to anything, be it hard- or software before the problem started occuring.

In-detail symptoms were:
- Mouse would stay movable a short time, then freeze like the rest of the screen.
- If I played music at the time, it would go on a few secs;
- After both aforementioned things stopped, I'd hear a loud beep from the speakers. Everything was frozen after that, only help a reboot.
- Sometimes, but not always, I would see a "stair effect" on the top of the active window; by that, I mean most of it being blue the way it should, but a part either greyish or totally white; the border between the two areas being a "stair" of pixels. Hope you can imagine what I mean...
-Rarely, I would get a bluescreen and an automatic reboot so fast that I couldn't read the message displayed.

In D3D applications (Warcraft III, to be exact), everything ran just fine.

Again, I formatted and reinstalled windows etc, which didnt solve the problem at all.

As these crashes were annoying, but only occured when browsing/using MS OFfice etc, I "solved" it by turning off hardware acceleration when in working windows, and turning it on when playing - which worked just fine.


Recently, however, I can't start WC3 (or any other program requiring D3D) at all. Whenever I start it, the screen turns black (like it always does when starting it), but then nothing else happens. Sometimes a small squarish area around the mouse cursor and the mouse cursor itself would not turn black, but keep showing what was on the windows screen at that place when starting WC3. Like the windows freezes, music would go on a short while, the windows cursor was visible & movable for a few secs, then no reaction to anything. I would see the little light showing processor activity flashing now and then. Again, I got a bluescreen on just a few of these occasions; this time long enough to read it. It claimed problems with ati2dvag.dll and my graphic drivers causing an infinite loop. VERY rarely it would let me start and play normally, but freeze, after 1,2,4 whatever hours, or not at all. Next startup I was back at the instant crashes however.

I googled a bit and saw this is a rather common symptom among Radeon Mobility cards. None of the suggested solutions helped however.

Note that until that point of time I used the driver provided by Acer.

Some of the things I tried then (unsuccessfully, obviously...) were:

- Updating my Chipset (VIA) drivers

- Using the newest Omega drivers
- Playing around with ATT tools, most notably:
+ Turning Fastwrite off, turning VPU recovery off, switching between AGP 8x and 4x.
(With VPU recovery on, I could see the screen turn off and on repeatedly after the crash, as if the VPU was restarted; nothing else happened though)
+ I also jiggled around with almost evrything it let me do, to no success.
- I checked dxdiag, which showed no problems; the Direct3D test would run, albeit the cube would turn much faster that I think it should (i..e it ws rather jumping than turning smoothly)
- I tried using all possible levels of the hardware acceleration bar
- I tried OpenGL, with either hardware acceleration or D3D turned off, it wouldn't work at all; with both turned on, it would produce the well-known crash.
- I turned the windows-error-notification/report thingy on (the one that ones to send problem logs after a crash etc); it wouldn't give me details, but again name ati2dvag.dll as the reason for the error.
-I highly doubt it's a temperature problem, as it happens even right after the first boot of the day; I have cleaned all the fan outlet etc though.

Just this morning, I tried the newest catalyst from http://www.station-drivers.com/page/...20mobility.htm (official Radeon releases don't support my board) together with CCC. (and yeah, I used driver cleaner pro etc, same with the previous driver exchange). This hasn't brought any improvement, except that the VPU recovery now actually seems to work - it kicks me back to windows and wants to send the error report to ATI. I have saved the file, in case it can give some valuable information.

Totmorrow I'll lend an external CRT monitor from a friend and see if that changes anything.

Well, that's my story right there. What startles me the most is the sudden appearance of the problem; like I said, I changed nothing prior to it, and it didn't go away after formatting and going back to a system/driver setup in which it had worked flawlessly over a rather long period. I hope somebody has any more ideas on how to fix this. I'd be really grateful...

I have tried to give any bit of info I can remeber; if there's any open questions, feel free to ask, of course.

rumbite

I know this is an old post but I am having this same problem. Anyone know a solution?