Write combining & ATI IGP 345

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.ati (More info?)

What's "write combining" and is it supposed to enabled?

Received a new Sony VAIO laptop with the ATI IGP 345 driving the video.
Did a clean install of XP Pro and installed all the appropriate drivers
from Sony's support site. Not soon after I started to see lots of
screen corruption when using my two main programs (K-meleon web broswer
and Xnews), "BAD_POOL_HEADER" BSOD's, and other XP out of resourse/what
seemed to be memory related errors. Installed sp1 and then sp2 and
still had the problems. The only alternative driver I could find were
Omega's (http://www.omegadrivers.net/) and the problem still occured.
Just when I was at my boiling point, I disabled "write combining" and
now all seems to be working properly, no more problems.

I noticed that on my desktop machine with an Nvidia GeForce4 MMX 440
it's enabled and I've never had a problem.

TIA