4850 driver issues advise please

Really the problem may be Vista and the old games, not the 4850. If the games play on a systme with XP with the service packs install then they will play on Vista.

Ya no that's not true. I have not heard anything but good about that card and have heard not a thing about driver issues with older games. And believe me, I do a lot of research on ATI/AMD type stuff.

One thing I will say is that they have had issues with some games because the ati drivers switch gpu/memory speeds quickly when moving from pure 3d to 2d menus (an effort to save power I believe). This causes crashes for some people.

I think older games get hit harder because some of them tend to have more 2d/3d flipping back and forth.

There is a huge thread about this on the ati support forums. I ran into the issue myself. I would constantly have crashes when I would go into my menus but it would work fine as long as I kept playing the 3d game.

What you had to do was manually manipulate a file and basically set it to always run at the same settings. That worked for me. More recently I tried the 8.10 drivers and haven't had a problem with them without having to make those changes. From looking at the files in 8.10 it looks like they set speeds constant.

So at this point I can tell you that I am not having issues anymore.