HP dc5850 / ATI Radeon 3100 (onboard) crashing

[LCPSWolf]

Hey all,

 

My district just about ~300 HP dc5850's that have onboard ATI Radeon 3100's.

 

Nice, but I'm noticing as I use one of the test systems that the video driver will hang intermittantly.

 

Now, true, the video driver will recover, but it freezes the system for about 10 seconds and the screen blanks out. Most users will be very disturbed.

 

I've tried reloading the most recent Catalyst driver (it's the same version as the one installed).

 

I've had this happen on multiple dc5850's, so hardware is not likely the issue. This has also happened with the out-of-the-box software load as well as a fresh XP load.

 

Ideas?

 

Specs: XP Pro SP3, 4 GB ram, onboard video (as above). I'll be glad to fill in any more info that you need.

[SYNACK]

TBH I have always found the ATI drivers to be as unstable as enritched uranium. Do you use the computers for much 3D accelerated stuff that requires the absoloute best performance like games or are they just used as standard workstations. If they are primarily used for less challanging tasks I would suggest reverting to the older and usually more stable Windows update provided drivers. They usually have a cut down feature set and are much more stable in a domain environment.

 

I'm pretty sure that they should be avalible via windows update but do not appear to be in the catalogue for deployable downloading for any OS older than Vista.

[Batman]

Whenever you install an ATI driver, always do a minimal install and never, ever install the catalyst control center. It's bloated and buggy and you don't need it anyway, maybe that's what's causing it to be unstable?

 

I really rate ATI these days, but that's because their Linux support has been getting much much better recently, I know that's not any help to you Windows users!

[LCPSWolf]

Batman,

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I just pulled down the ATI driver off the HP site and left out the Catalyst Control Center as you suggested and only installed the display driver and the Hydravision (multiple monitor support and tricks).

 

So far, so good. Many thanks

[Batman]

I'm glad that helped you

[LCPSWolf]

For what it's worth, after playing with the above system some more, the issue continued. I swapped systems again and the issue cleared up, so I'm thinking I have at least 1 system with a bad integrated video.

 

Though regardless I'm still not using the Catalyst CC. Thanks again.

[Batman]

ATI integrated video can be like that, we have a suite of computers with ATI 9100 GPUs in our design block where 70% work with the device driver and the other 30% don't, despite never crashing when the driver isn't installed. I have a theory that the driver uses the GPU to its full potential, which means it gets hotter and causes the computer to crash. Couldn't be sure, but there's a similar problem with G3 and G4 Apple iBooks, which have bad ATI graphics controllers; the BGA chips become unseated due to excessive heat.