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[ShadeofGreen]

Anyone know any good ones. I used to be able to go to gamefaqs for most help but not these days. Any suggestions and, if any of you guys are computer savvy, take a stab at this problem...

copied from another forum.

So I keep getting this BSOD, it flashs too quicky to get any other info oscreen except this.

DRIVER_IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL

But the story goes a little deeper. Yesterday I got a message from ATI control center that said the GPU (Radeon x1600 512, PCI express) had been reset, I shut off my computer for the day. I turn on my compter today and the monitor is set to 800x600 and is at 4-bit color, and no matter what I try to do I cannot change this. Every possible way to adjust the resolution fails.

I reinstall the ATI drivers I had downloaed when I got the card, roughly two months ago. SUCCESS! Oh wait, it works for around ten minutes and a few second after I open a torrent program I get a crash, and the BSOD above.

Restart, windows won't load, goes directly to BSOD. I restart in safe mode, works ok, reloaded the ATI Drivers (I can't seem to download the new ones anyone ever have that prob?). So now with the drivers installed I have the same old problem of 800x600 4-bit color that can' change, cept' now it won't go back to normal like it did before. I have since uninstalled the driver and all ATIO programs and am typing this in 1280x1084 32-bit but if I load the drivers I get a crash.

I had gotten the same BSOD about five months ago but it proved to be a faulty memory chip, the memory now is new. Here are my full stats.

Windows XP SP3
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.01 Ghz
BFG nForces 4 Ultra mobo pci express
1gb Dual channel Ram
Two old drives CD and DVD
120 Gig HDD
on board audio

As an update I've been running it without the Radeon drivers as thats the only way to acheive a normal resolution and bit range. I just can't do anything graphical, which is mucho obnoxious.

[50%grey]

Google

Sounds like a driver conflict ,but could be alot of things.

just google youre problem ,chances are someone has run into the same thing. Better to hit alot of message boards then just one

Also theres a ATI driver cleaner app that you can launch from safemode that cleans out youre previous install, before you reinstall new drivers


Might want to go with a clean install and make an image after youre done tweaking it the way you want it. That way if something like this happens again you can just reimage youre system in like 15 min. Dont use the Microsoft rollback feature , ghost an image is the way to go.

[50%grey]

Did about 2 seconds of searching of google,and looks like the majority of the people that have this problem have had defective video cards.

Do you have another card you can swap out to test it? do you have a spare hardrive you could load windows on to test youre HD as well? have you checked to see if youre Ram is compatible with youre MoBo?

[Crimson Spider]

http://forums.techguy.org/

[Dash Martin]

Yank out a module of RAM and test. If it fails, swap them out and retest. I'm willing to bet the BSOD will end one of those times. If it's name brand RAM, it should have a lifetime warranty.

[ShadeofGreen]

Weird I didn't find any defective video card probs on my google search. The problem is that I would have tried to test it a long time ago, except seeing as how I have never had a PCI express machine, I do not have a PCI express card, and don't know anyone with one.

I would check the memory except this is a mobo with dual channel and I only have those two sticks, and I get problems when I only use one, so I feel like it wouldn't be a very effective of clean test (or would it?).

The main problem right now is that the card won't work when the driver is installed. And it sorta works without a driver, in the sense that I can alter the resolution and color depth.

So I've been having trouble since I may actually have two problems (memory, and the graphics card) though I can't really test anything very well, but thats what it seems to me.

Does this make sense to anyone, I have received a great deal of resistance from other boards.

[Dash Martin]

Pulling out 1 stick of ram will automatically bump the system down to single channel. Should cause any problems except for a slower system...but nothing that'd prevent you from using it while waiting for a BSOD. If the BSOD still happens, swap the stick out with the other one and try again.

As for the Radeon drivers, I've never had an issue downloading them before. At what point do you get hung up? Are you using IE or Firefox to download them?

[ShadeofGreen]

I got the latest drivers actually, but the result is still the same. Lowest resolution 4-bit color.

[Dash Martin]

It's broken. If the proper drivers are installed and it's still not displaying properly, you need to replace it. Only other alternative is to go to the site of the card's manufacturer and see if they maybe have a firmware update for it...but that's not as common for videocards as it used to be.