Dell 32MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra Problem

S

Scott D. Orr

Hi there,

I have a problem and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for
fixing it. I recently rebuilt my tower computer system, with an MSI
6167 mainboard and an Athlon Thunderbird 700 Slot A CPU (with 128MB of
RAM--and I'm absolutely sure there are no RAM problems). The video
card I had been using, with no problems at all, was a 16MB 3dfx
Voodoo3 3000. However, my father gave me the remains of a Dell system
that had been struck by lightning, including a Dell proprietary 32MB
ATI Rage 128 video card. I sold most of the parts of the system, but
the video card was marginally faster than the Voodoo3, with real
32-bit color capability, and I figured I could get more for the
Voodoo3 on eBay, especially since I sitll had the retail box for it,
so I kept the ATI card.

For the most part, it works just fine, but I've discovered that when
I'm playing Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord (the only full-screen
game I ever play), if I switch out of the game window, or get switched
out by a popup dialog box, and then switch back in, the game sounds
starts back up again, but then the game freezes before I get any
display other than a blank black screen (actually the whole computer
locks up until I close the game using CTRL-ALT-DEL).

I'm assuming this is a video driver problem of some sort, but Dell has
released only one driver for this card, and the regular ATI Rage
drivers won't install on it. Does anyone have any suggestions for
fixing it?

Thanks,

Scott Orr
 
P

Paul Murphy

Sounds like it might indeed be driver related. You could *try* installing
the ATI drivers by changing the PnP entry's in the driver .inf file to match
the PnP entry in the Dell Supplied inf (assuming you can get at the actual
driver files from within the downloaded archive). Of course even if you can
get them to install there's no guarantee they'll fix the problem.

Paul
 
S

Scott D. Orr

Sounds like it might indeed be driver related. You could *try* installing
the ATI drivers by changing the PnP entry's in the driver .inf file to match
the PnP entry in the Dell Supplied inf (assuming you can get at the actual
driver files from within the downloaded archive). Of course even if you can
get them to install there's no guarantee they'll fix the problem.
Thanks. I thought it might be something like this. I've also read
someone's suggestion that you might edit the card's registry entry.
I'm not sure exactly how to do either of these things, though (yes, I
know how do edit the registry, but I'm not sure what I'm looking for
here). How do I do it, or where do I look for instructions?

Scott Orr
 
P

Paul Murphy

Another thing which may have relevance is how did you uninstall the Voodoo 3
software/drivers and at what point? When changing video cards, the idea is
you should go to "standard VGA drivers" and uninstall the cards supplied
drivers/software once this has been completed, ONLY THEN shutdown the
machine and swap hardware. Upon booting into windows with the new card
installed, drivers should be requested by the OS. Is that exactly how its
been for you (and in that order)?

Even then some graphics card drivers don't fully uninstall using the
add/remove programs function and bits are left behind. This can cause
problems with using other cards of a different type. The "safe" way around
this is to do a complete "from the ground up" installation of
windows/applications on a freshly formatted hard drive. Is this something
you are familiar with? If not, I think it might be time for you to take the
PC to a knowledgeable computer tech for assistance. Although you could
search for information on the net (using search engines) about how to
perform these procedures (including registry and inf file editing), it may
mean a fair bit of learning for you if you've not touched these topics
before. They're not things which can be easily summarised here and I have no
links to give you, perhaps other people have suitable URLs?

Paul
 
S

Scott D. Orr

Another thing which may have relevance is how did you uninstall the Voodoo 3
software/drivers and at what point? When changing video cards, the idea is
you should go to "standard VGA drivers" and uninstall the cards supplied
drivers/software once this has been completed, ONLY THEN shutdown the
machine and swap hardware. Upon booting into windows with the new card
installed, drivers should be requested by the OS. Is that exactly how its
been for you (and in that order)?

I seem to remember vaguely that there's no other way to do it?
Doesn't the OS force you to do that? I could uninstall and reinstall,
though.

Mind you, I doubt it's this--the driver seems to work normally in all
other ways.
Even then some graphics card drivers don't fully uninstall using the
add/remove programs function and bits are left behind. This can cause
problems with using other cards of a different type. The "safe" way around
this is to do a complete "from the ground up" installation of
windows/applications on a freshly formatted hard drive. Is this something
you are familiar with? If not, I think it might be time for you to take the
PC to a knowledgeable computer tech for assistance. Although you could
search for information on the net (using search engines) about how to
perform these procedures (including registry and inf file editing), it may
mean a fair bit of learning for you if you've not touched these topics
before. They're not things which can be easily summarised here and I have no
links to give you, perhaps other people have suitable URLs?

I reinstalled Windows BEFORE all this happened, and the problem is
minor enough that it's not worth doing again (esp. since chances are
that wouldn't fix it). Actually, I may even have done a reinstall
afterwards as well--I was having a lot of problems with other,
unrelated things.

As I said, I've edited the registry before, and it can't be that hard
to edit an .inf file (as I recall, they're in ASCII)--but I know know
specifically what I'm looking for.

Scott Orr
 
P

Paul Murphy

The other (wrong) way to do it is to just shutdown the machine and swap
hardware BEFORE doing anything to uninstall the old cards drivers/software
first. Uninstalling the software at a later stage will not go exactly the
same because the card is no longer in the machine (even though Windows will
still ask for the new drivers on boot).

Given that you're familiar with performing windows installations (from
scratch?) and the fact that you're unsure whether a fresh install has been
performed since the new card was installed, I think that would be a good way
to rule out anything other than the driver - i.e. if it still plays up on a
freshly installed OS with just the minimal drivers, DirectX and the game
installed THEN (and only then) you know its likely to be driver related.
Then you could try modifying the inf for the ATI supplied driver package to
suit your OEM card - note that you'll need to be able to access the
individual driver files in order to do this though, many drivers come in
archives which will only extract if the correct hardware is detected (via
the PnP ID). You'll need to have a look at the ATI supplied drivers to see
if you can get at the individual file you need.

Paul
 
S

Scott D. Orr

The other (wrong) way to do it is to just shutdown the machine and swap
hardware BEFORE doing anything to uninstall the old cards drivers/software
first. Uninstalling the software at a later stage will not go exactly the
same because the card is no longer in the machine (even though Windows will
still ask for the new drivers on boot).

Given that you're familiar with performing windows installations (from
scratch?) and the fact that you're unsure whether a fresh install has been
performed since the new card was installed, I think that would be a good way
to rule out anything other than the driver - i.e. if it still plays up on a
freshly installed OS with just the minimal drivers, DirectX and the game
installed THEN (and only then) you know its likely to be driver related.
Then you could try modifying the inf for the ATI supplied driver package to
suit your OEM card - note that you'll need to be able to access the
individual driver files in order to do this though, many drivers come in
archives which will only extract if the correct hardware is detected (via
the PnP ID). You'll need to have a look at the ATI supplied drivers to see
if you can get at the individual file you need.
Thank you for the advice. As I said before, reinstalling Windows
really is NOT a good solution--it's not worth three days of
reinstalling every bit of software, driver, and patch on the machine
just to eliminate a minor annoyance. I'll look into the other
solution though. Do you know where in the registry I'd look for a PnP
ID?

Scott Orr
 
P

Paul Murphy

In short - I don't know. You could try finding the PNP ID from the existing
inf file by tracing it to the name the card is displayed as under device
manager. Then change the new infs PNP ID to match - this is NOT modifying
the registry, its modifying the inf. You don't need to modify the registry
and if you try changing the actual hardware ID detected it'll fail because
Windows will just detect the correct one from the hardware when it boots.

Paul
 
S

Scott D. Orr

In short - I don't know. You could try finding the PNP ID from the existing
inf file by tracing it to the name the card is displayed as under device
manager. Then change the new infs PNP ID to match - this is NOT modifying
the registry, its modifying the inf. You don't need to modify the registry
and if you try changing the actual hardware ID detected it'll fail because
Windows will just detect the correct one from the hardware when it boots.
Okay, I think I can probably manage that. Thanks.

Scott
 

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