ATI All in Wonder Problem with Windows XP

[tkistre]

A friend (teacher) ask me to look at her Dell computer at school. It would not boot she stated. I went and it seems to boot, but once it got to Windows (XP Pro) it would reboot, several times. If it didn't reboot, the screen would go black right after the Windows XP Splash screen. When it did finally make it to windows, it stated the ATI device (AIW 128 Pro PCI) driver was causing the problem. The computer had been working fine to this point. I reinstalled the driver, downloaded from ATI's site, but problem persist. I assumed that the video card may be bad so I got another AIW (Pro PCI not 128 Pro) card from a working computer and tried it. I loaded the appropriate driver from ATI's site but this card would only go to a black screen when Windows loaded, unless I went to safe mode, which it would work. I tried it in a different PCI slot but no better. I tried to uninstall the driver through Control Panel, but it will not let me. I changed the BIOS to use the onboard Intel 815 video so she could use the computer for now, but she needs the AIW card to do some capture before the end of the school year.

Anyone have any experience with this problem? If so, any suggestions on what to try?

Dell Optiplex (not sure which one)
384mb PC133
PIII 933
Intel 815 chipset
Onboard sound, LAN, Video
20 gig Hard drive
AIW 128 Pro PCI video (also tried AIW Pro PCI video)
DVD drive & floppy, that's it.

 

[sumrtym]

Are you sure there aren't any shared IRQ problems?

 

[tkistre]

 

[tkistre]

No, I'm not sure. I only had about 30 minutes to check it out and the other things I listed took that long. I'll have to look at that Monday when she is back at school.

A friend of mine said he thought he had read about ATI problems with XP. I've only used one ATI video card with XP and didn't have any problems. I generally use nVidia cards when I build computers. Any other thoughts on why the video would go black after loading windows? Works in safe mode which leads me to believe it is a driver issue. I've tried to uninstall the drivers through control panel but it will not let me, stating "can not uninstall older drivers." I thought this might be possible problem. I've seen some video cards not take new drivers unless you uninstall the older drivers. Any suggestions on how to uninstall the older drivers? Any other thoughts?

 

[tkistre]

Bump, anyone?

 

[Slammy1]

Use driver cleaner to uninstall, as seen here:
http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/

I had some issues on the 3.4 catalyst upgrade, mainly due to an instability on overclocking (messed up my SCSI card). I'd recommend a fresh install of all the utilities also, at least that seemed to work for me.

 

[tkistre]

Thanks, I'll give that a try to see if that helps get rid of the old driver so I can perform a clean install of the new one.