Hi. I have an ATI Radeon 8500 64MB DDR Graphics card, and have been
experiencing many problems which I belive are directly related to the
drivers. I just recently completely reformatted my hard drive and
reinstalled windows xp professional, and updated the drivers to the
latest version as soon as Windows XP was installed. Unfortunately,
this does not solve the problem. Every so often the machine will
completely reboot for no apparent reason. Upon reboot, the windows
error reporting service claims it is an error caused by a graphics
device driver. Please help! I have tried hundreds of combonatins of
BIOS settings, driver versions, driver producers, and pretty much
anything else. I have done everything except turn off certain
acceleration features, but im not going to do this because then I
would not be able to play certain games. I am not overclocking
anything, and heat is not the problem as far as i can tell. There are
no "conflicts" listed in the hardware manager or any indication of any
problem.

System:

Gigabyte ga7vrx VIA-based motherboard (flashed to latest bios, and via
4-in-1 pack installed to latest version)
Athlon xp 1800+
Soundblaster Live value (latest drivers)
Maxtor 7200rpm 80gb
Realtek PCI lan card

once again, i am stumped. Any suggestions to stop these random
crash/reboots?

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Request for Question Clarification by tisme-ga on 12 Jan 2003 22:29 PST

Hello molszewski,

Yikes, it appears you have tried everything! 

Do you still have warrenty on the card? It might be a good idea to
contact ATI at this point. It could be the drivers are having trouble
with the hardware and are unable to function properly.

Here is contact information for ATI:
http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/contact/coninfo.html

I wish you the best of luck...

tisme-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 12 Jan 2003 22:34 PST

molszewski...

You can stop XP from shutting down on some types of system
errors. Right-click on 'My Computer', select 'Properties',
then the 'Advanced' tab, and then on 'Startup and Recovery', uncheck
'Automatically reboot' under 'System Failure'.

If Windows doesn't reboot, it may give you some different
messages which will be more informative. Have you tried
this yet?

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Clarification of Question by molszewski-ga on 13 Jan 2003 06:08 PST

I purchased the card as an OEM product through an internet vendor. It
IS however a "made by ATI" card, just without the original box,
manual, etc. I dont believe returning the card is an option,
especially since the product was purchased many months ago.
sublime1-ga, I tried your advice, and now i just have to wait until
the error occurs again.

I only offer this information because a similar situation happened to
me. It really is only a comment.

I purchased an OEM ATI all-in-wonder 128 Pro off an internet site, and
had the same problems with Windows 2000. Initially, it was a
motherboard problem, and two BIOS flashes later, it at least didn't
crash as often. The ATI drivers were in beta for over a YEAR, during
which the various driver updates would alternately solve some problems
and introduce others. I feel that ATI is incompetent when it comes to
drivers.

You might try turning down the advanced features, just to find out if
it makes any difference so you have some extra leverage complaining to
ATI.

Lastly, although I only know about 5 people with XP, they all suffer
random periodic crashes, all supposedly from video drivers. This makes
me suspicious of Windows XP.

Hi,

ATI recommends a power supply unit of at least 400W to use with Radeon
8500... Maybe upgrading your power supply could solve the problem.

Hope this helps,
Regards
Bio