new mobo..new ati...no FS9

[Guest]

Hi,

Due to the mysterious dying habits of motherboards I had to (just yesterday)
build myself a new (almost) computer. I was running a 478 socket with a 3.2P4
and a X800, 2GB ram and FS9.1. All was well until the fateful morning when
upon punching the ON button on the pc all the pretty little lights came
on..except for the monitor. Not even the BIOS screen. My assumption: dead
mobo. Whatever...

Not finding a decent 478 replacement I decided to forgo this year's holidays
and build a newer,'better' pc.

Many hundreds of euros later I was admiring my old Antec case playing host
to an Asus P5WD2-E Premium (s775, i975x) a P4 920-D (3.0Ghz), 1 GB of
Kingston's finest DDR2 and a PCI-express ATI X1600Pro (512MB). Old soundcard
(Audigy2), and my old hard drives. Downloaded and installed the very latest
Catalysts (6.6) off the Ati site. Everything looked good to go until I
double-clicked on FS9.
Zip. Nada. Just a little window informing me that: "Invalid Hardware or
Driver Detected."
Further investigation and running dxdiag gave me this little gem:
"Hardware accelerated Direct3D 9+ is not available because the display
driver does not support it. You may be able to get a newer driver from the
hardware manufacturer."

I'm running WinXP Home (SP1), DIrectX 9.0c. No other games on this machine
so I can't cross-check.

Over to you, hoping that you can help.

Cheers,

 

[Guest]

So did you ever figure out why your mobo's seem to die off
"mysteriously'.....? Sounds like you got lots of hardware from your old pc,
but maybe you need a better video card.... I suppose you checked your cmos
to ensure your graphic win size is more than 8 megs, your ram speed is max'd,
and maybe you are set to "overclocking".....

Have you tried running any bench marks software or systems diagnostics to
see what your system is capable of at this time?

You might get some help from sysinfo32.exe (system information). Also, i
think microsoft has a new screensaver that can test your directX too.. If I
remember it is stated to be: "TEST THE POWER OF DIRECTX"

 

[Rich Barry]

Knack, go to Guru3d and download different Catalyst Driver. Also, get
this Driver Remover.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27

Remove the old driver from Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel and also
from Device Manager>Display Adaptor.
Then use the ATI Remover to get all of it. Restart in Safe Mode and
install the Driver you downloaded from guru3d.
Restart back into Normal Mode.

 

[Guest]

Not mobos..just the one. The old hardware I carried over are a Maxtor IDE
drive and a Seagate SATA.
Someone suggested a format and clean installation of XP (because of the new
mobo) but quite honestly, at this point, I simply do not have the time, the
patience and the memory (of how I have set various progs
up..keys..passwords..etc) to go through what is obviously the best solution,
hence my post here wondering whether someone may offer a workaround. No, I
am not overclocking anything. Never have and probably never will since I
figure that's something for the more computer-savvy folks than me!