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Hi, I am working on a friend's machine, it's a very old compaq deskpro with a PIII 600MHz processor, her problem is that her old PC with a savage card peformed better in the old 3D games that this one with an ATi RAGE PRO AGP 2x, my questions are: Can an old integrated S3 savage card be better than an ATi rage pro AGP? can it be a driver problem? (I have downloaded the "newest" drivers from the AMD website but I have been unable to install them) How can I remove old ATi drivers and go back to the standard VGA driver from Microsoft? Thanx inadvance
"How can I remove old ATi drivers and go back to the standard VGA driver from Microsoft?"
Why would you want to do that? Graphics performance will drop off even more with standard VGA.
"I have downloaded the "newest" drivers from the AMD website but I have been unable to install them"
I can only guess that you got the wrong drivers. The Rage Pro is very old & is no longer supported. You need to get the older legacy drivers. You're not running XP on that old system, are you? Does it have at least 512MB RAM? If not, it's gonna perform poorly no matter what you do.
For 9x, get driver version 4.13.2655
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownlo...
For XP, get driver version 5.10.2600.6010
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It's running XP (it has 256 MB of RAM and exeeds win XP requirements). Sure It's and old PC, but it runs XP fine without a glitch. I downloaded the right drivers i'm sure, I'm trying to update them but I can't without reverting back to the standard VGA driver so then I can install, that's what the installer is asking me to do.
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If you feel 256MB is adequate, I'm not gonna argue.
"I downloaded the right drivers i'm sure"
The file name should be wxp-j5-30-1-bo2.exe...is that what you have? Did you read the instructions?
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"it has 256 MB of RAM and exeeds win XP requirements"
I'll argue. :-) Just because you meet the system requirements, doesn't mean the system will run at it's maximum speed. XP systems for 'most' users will run better with at least 512mb of RAM. If you have less then the optimum amount of RAM, the system has to resort to paging memory to and from the hard drive, which slows it down.
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If you uninstall it from device manager that will remove the drivers but if XP has native support for the savage (which it probably does) then on next bootup it will reinstall. Have you tried going through display properties to force the standard VGA install?
I want a star too! "I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!"
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"I'll argue."
I'll argue back. Unless you do something crazy like fire up Photoshop or more than 5 tabs in your web browser, Win XP will run fine with 256MB. When XP was first released, I ran it on a system with 256MB (maybe 384MB?) of RAM. While it couldn't quite match the speed of Windows 2000, it definitely outperformed Win 98SE on the same machine.
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Well, I reinstalled win XP and the machine was performing better but 3D performance sucks the same(there is no way I could disable windows' own ati rage drivers or install the drivers I downloaded for it (the ones you mention) through setup, by using windows' driver upgrade wizard and pointing to the exact location of the drivers, and I couldn't unsintall ther ATi drivers from the add/remove programs(there is an entry there) but it won't let me uninstall them. The Rage pro simply sucks and since the compaq case won't allow me to try the voodoo 4 I have to try and see I just gave the machine back to my friend to get rid of it and get something half decent (i.e. P4). As far as Win XP is concerned the min specs back in 2001 were: PII 333, 128MB of RAM and 2-4GBHDD space. On a machine like that it sucked, on this old machine (quite better)It ran pretty well (obviously using adequate software for that machine too, I won't try GTAIV, I'm no rookie at this) and OF COURSE on a multi core machine with 2-4GB of RAM WinXP flies. My PC has 3GB of RAM and Windows Vista runs very well. My compaq presario laptop originally had 512MB of RAM (the minimum for WinVista) and it was just awful, after an upgrade it improved drastically (anyway I'm running Win7RC on it and it rocks). Thank you all for your help.
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