I bought a new Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB video card. I installed the drivers by the insulation disk and didn't really care for the picture. It looked as if I was running in safemode still. But it was the card because i could play Call Of Duty. after 2 weeks the system started freezing up when windows booted up. I took a different hard drive installed a fresh copy of windows 2K went and installed the motherboard items Lan sound ect.. and all the updates from Micro site. no other software was on it. I put the Video card disk in and installed it same problem. as the icons appear for windows it freezes some Icons are ok others still white. the mouse still moves but after clicking on start twice it also freezes. I go into safemode uninstall the drivers and all is ok. of course the picture stinks but it runs. I went into the bios and it's setup for the card. AGP Aperture 128m AGP3.0 Mode 8x AGP Driving control AUTO AGP fast write Disabled. the card requires -> Minimum System Requirements: Intel Pentium 4/III, Celeron II, AMD K7/Athlon, Athlon XP with AGP 8X (0.8v), 4X (1.5V) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration (8X/4X). 128MB of system memory Installation software requires CD-ROM drive Windows XP, 2000, NT, ME, 98SE . Can anyone come up with anything else that could be causing this card to act up I tried the new ati driver but might have put them in backwards, The cystaing thing then drivers or dose it mater which installs first ?? the first instalation was by disk and automaticly done. help my motherboard is a PT800CE-A have 3.0 Ghz P4 CPU and 1GB DDR400 Samsung Ram windows 2K with SP4 installed onboard lan and sound 450 watts power supply 2 cdroms 3 hard drives any ideals ??

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"I took a different hard drive installed a fresh copy of windows 2K went and installed the motherboard items Lan sound ect.. and all the updates from Micro site. no other software was on it". This implies that you started this time with an unformatted drive that never had an OS on it. Is that correct? If not, did you reformat the disk? Did you read the installation proceedure for the ATI radeon 9600? There is a certain series of steps needed in order to get a successful installation. ALL of thes steps need to be followed. First thing that comes to mind is installing the drivers before updating to SP4. SP1 doesn't support DX9 and that will give you problems. ATI as well as nVidia cards are the top performers BECAUSE they don't use the generic drivers provided by MSoft. I repeat, you need to follow all the installation instructions. I suggest that now you remove ALL the ATI drivers and software then use the ATI removal utilities to CLEAN the system. Then follow all instructions that accompany the latest Catalyst drivers for Win2000 from ATI's site. Find the maintenence utilities here, there are 2 utilities, use them both: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/misc/catalystutils.html Find the latest drivers for your system here: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/win2k/radeonwdm-2k.html?type=2k&prodType=graphic&prod=products2kdriver&submit.x=8&submit.y=9