thelonesoldier

Hi, I have an Acer 5672wlmi with a Mobility Radeon x1600. The factory drivers are from May of 2006 (obviously badly out of date) and have serious compatibility issues with new games. Furthermore, Acer seems to have tinkered with the hardware settings of the card, and it doesn't work right with any of the third party drivers I've tried.

Counter-Strike Source frequently freezes or crashes to desktop, and Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 almost always crash to desktop, either with a video-related error message or no message. Other games have various issues - Hitman 2 crashes to desktop almost immediately even from the menu, Escape From Butcher Bay has artifacts and occasional corruption, and Doom 3 just runs incredibly slow (but that's more of iD's fault, I think).

I am already aware that this is a driver issue, so please don't bother telling me that. I've tried all the third party drivers I can find, but I haven't been able to find anything that is stable. I've used the latest versions of both Omega Driver and the desktop drivers via DH Mod Tool, but I experience similar stability issues with both of them (and additional random problems with Windows that never occur with the original drivers).

Yes, I've been completely uninstalling old drivers before trying a new set, I've been using Driver Cleaner, blah blah blah I know how to install drivers. The problem is that none of the drivers are working correctly.

I've messed with all the settings, trying different combinations of Catalyst AI, performance vs. quality, ATI Tray Tools vs. CCC, and so on and so on. Nothing works consistently.

If someone can give me a suggestion about how to try fixing the problem (that I haven't already said I've tried!) I'd appreciate it.


SPECS:
Acer 5672wlmi
Intel Centrino Duo 1.66ghz dual core processor
1024mb RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon x1600 - 128mb dedicated (but it uses shared memory so the total is 512). The card's memory is underclocked for some reason - I think the GPU is at ~450mhz but the video RAM is at something like ~360mhz.
Windows XP Home SP2