Is there any way to see how much memory each device driver on a Windows 2000
system is using?

I'm running the latest ATI Catalyst drivers with RADEON 9800 Pro on a Compaq
Workstation W8000 with dual 2.4 GHz processors. Even with 2 GB of physical
memory, I am running out of memory. Icons and other graphic resources at
some point stop drawing completely. The Task Manager usually tells me
when this is happening that I have somewhere between 300 and 500 MB of
physical memory occupied. Kernel memory in total is only showing around 90
MB.

I assume that either the video drivers are corrupting on their own, or some
device driver is ill behaved and is corrupting some part of the kernel's
memory space. At this point, I don't have any insight into how to
determine:

1) What device drivers are running on the system, and which of those were
added by Microsoft and which were added by me?

2) How much resource (CPU and memory) do each of those drivers take?

How can I answer those questions?

What other things can I check for regarding running out of memory so quickly
on a memory rich machine?

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com

Did the Radeon card come with the computer originally or it was an upgrade?
Did you install the Compaq softpacks?

I have the latest Compaq BIOS installed, which is fairly old unfortunately.
The card was an upgrade not the original card. I am running the native ATI
drivers, and I wouldn't ever want to run a high end video card used in part
for gaming on Compaq versions of the drivers. They would likely be out of
date, at very least.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com

"Jetro" <no.spam@internet> wrote in message
news:O3Q1%(E-Mail Removed)...
> Did the Radeon card come with the computer originally or it was an
upgrade?
> Did you install the Compaq softpacks?
>
>

I've seen bad video behavior exactly as described after multiple upgrades
from NVidia to ATI and vice versa. The latest BIOS for W8000 is timestamped
by Dec 03 and it's fairly new.

Have you found any way to correct the behavior on such systems?

Thanks for the heads up about the new firmware release.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com


"Jetro" <no.spam@internet> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> I've seen bad video behavior exactly as described after multiple upgrades
> from NVidia to ATI and vice versa. The latest BIOS for W8000 is
timestamped
> by Dec 03 and it's fairly new.
>
>

The cure was obviously painful: clean install ) Manually cleaning didn't
help much, the bad video has been returned after some dozens of reboots,
alas. Next time, perhaps, I would use regmon and filemon.

I have observed this same bizarre behavior: you do a clean uninstall of
the ATI driver, followed by a clean install. Everything works, and over
the next few weeks things degrade slowly and you return back to the same
instability. What would explain such strange behavior. It's almost like
Nvidia has left some kind of virus on the system, watching for a clean ATI
install.

I blame the nVidia uninstaller, which is complete garbage. It leaves
behind huge numbers of registry entries and files. I ended up finding a
third party uinstaller for nVidia, but who knows if they got all the traces.

--
Will
westes AT earthbroadcast.com

"Jetro" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> The cure was obviously painful: clean install ) Manually cleaning didn't
> help much, the bad video has been returned after some dozens of reboots,
> alas. Next time, perhaps, I would use regmon and filemon.
>
>

Right. So you got me: Clean install of Windows...