Getting rid of old ATI drivers...

[noxnoctum]

Alright so for the past few months I've been having serious issues with certain games... lock ups, BSDs, temporary freezes and the occasional VPU recover thing.

The games that are having the biggest issues are Silent Storm (old game from 2003-04) and Achtung Panzer: Kharkov, which is a recent release but not super super demanding. Silent Storm plays fine for about an hour at which point I get a BSD or crashes and I get an error message saying something about ATI (I wish I'd copied it down but forgot to).

Achtung Panzer just gets CONSTANT freezes, as in every 20 minutes. Almost every time the VPU recover thing kicks in I can continue playing, but as you can imagine, it's not exactly fun when it freezes for 2 minutes every 20 minutes!

I also get the occasional stuttering and very short freezes in other games.

So I've got two main questions.

I thought maybe this has to do with old drivers still lurking around, so I uninstalled all ATI related stuff in control panel, and then went to the registry and got rid of stuff there, I also used Driver Sweeper and Driver Cleaner Pro to clean the system. But here's the thing, there are still ATI related files in my system32 folder and it won't let me delete them. They are as follows:

ati2evxx.dll
ati2cqag.dll
ati2dvag.dll
ati3duag.dll
atiadlxx.dll
atiapfxx.exe
atiapfxx.blb
atibtmon.exe
aticalcl.dll
aticaldd.dll
aticalrt.dll
atiexdxx.dll
atimpc32.dll
ATIODCLI.exe
ATIODE.exe
ativvaxx.dll

Now, for a couple of these, when I try to delete them I get this:

---------------------------
Error Deleting File or Folder
---------------------------
Cannot delete ati2evxx: Access is denied.

Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected
and that the file is not currently in use.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

But for the rest, it lets me delete them, but then they come back seconds later. It's seriously like a zombie file or something. Should I not be messing with them? I've just been having these issues and I wanted to make sure my computer was COMPLETELY clean of ATI related files before I install new drivers.

Second question... someone suggested that maybe underclocking might help for these two games in particular... how do I do this?

Thanks!

 

[noxnoctum]

Oh ya and forgot to mention, the card is a 4650, running on a otherwise standard Dell XPS 410, except I upgraded the PSU as well.

 

[JDFan]

What is the time you have set for the monitor to go into sleep mode in your settings ? -- since you mention it happening every 20 minutes is your monitor set to go to sleep after 20 minutes of non use ? Try disabling the power saving features and see if it helps. ( I know that was a problem with mine lately when playing movies they would shut doen and the monitor would go into sleep mode while watching a movie - so it might also be happening with an old game.)

 

[noxnoctum]

Hmmm great suggestion man I'm gonna try that.


As for Silent Storm, I tried underclocking my video card and got no crashes. Played for 5 hours straight (sad I know, but I was so happy it was FINALLY working), and no BSDs.