ati driver

so people tell me that ati is better than nvidia...i don't have an ati card, i've always been nvidia until my friend let me borrow his ati to test out.

i had the worst experience with it ever using the catalyst driver. system blue screens and shut downs...

when i talk with tons of people about ati they all say that the driver is the worse. so how is it better when the driver is the one "driving" the video card?

Wolfshadw i just had a thought and was wondering as you have experiance of both makes of cards,do you think its possable that the nvidea drivers are better at being overwritten and the ati ones are a bit more intollerant.
Mactronix

I agree with wolfshadw about being sure to blast out old drivers it's the number one thing people forget/ignore.

The only thing I'd add, is that before rebooting, unplug/diable the newtwork just to avoid drivers loading automatically from M$ if your OEM or you, configured it like that. Usually you should get a pop-up you can cancel, but sometimes things are set to automatically seek the drivers and load them. Unplugging the network ensures this doesn't happen. We used to tell people to do this, but now it's step 1 of the DriverCleaner instructions.

And for Mactronix BOTH are sticky, but in driver cleaner's early days they only mentioned nV's drivers by name as being the stickiest and not liking even going from nV to nV. Now however they're both about the same in that respect, although I do find it handy having the Catalyst uninstaller built-in.
Both have crap new bloated Vista Control Panels/Centres IMO (which you can workaround in XP), and both have a ton of issues. If anything there is no better/worse anymore. The only thing I prefer is WHQL drivers over Betas, but both respond equally quickly/slowly to bugs and performance issues so there are far more things that equalize them, than separate them nowadays.

I overwrite and blast out the old on the mobile. But then again I switch drivers alot trying a few different ones for features and such, I used to try all of them and bench them here, and I recommend anyone who is afraid of a lock-up or BSOD does a full clean, me I know what to do when it locks up, so I do both depending on time and whether I've already installed that verions or not (like if I return to the standard or Omegas I was using before from something else that I didn't like as much [DNA, etc]).

driver cleaner pro!

use it in safe mode, get rid of all old nvidia and ati drivers

go back to normal mode, install the new drivers from ati (not CCC) just display drivers. Then use ATI tray tool to mess around with the card rather than CCC.

alternatively....use the Omega drivers (they come with ati try tool as standard)