Legit Reviews

This was my original post under general forum but now that it seems to be a vid card issue, I have copied it to this forum. So after this post people said vid card was the problem so I bought a new card (see next post I'm copying also.

I want to get my oldest computer updated somewhat without replacing it, so I can play Dark Age of Camelot on it. I can play it right now but if there are too many people around me in the game or too many things going on, it gets really choppy and it has like 5 seconds worth of lag or more.
So I was wondering what I might be able to do to get it to run the game better. I suspect that I may just need a video card update but I thought I would see what everyone thinks. Keep in mind that this is my oldest and 4th (in use) computer. I will be using it for only the game really to run a bot account. So here's the info on it...

Built by IBUYPOWER
XP
1.5 GHz Athlon(m) XP 1800+
1 Gig of Ram
Nvidiia Geforce MX 440 (a problem but what other cards will MB control?)
MSI KT4V MS-6712 Ver 1.0 MB
WD 120Gig HD (6 months old)
Not sure on PS but prob a min type
Old mid tower supercool case

I hope that is the info you need. If video card is the most pressing issue, what kind and how big will this MB support? I don't want to have to change the whole inside. I would just like the game to not be so choppy and laggy. I seen that newegg has some video cards for 60-75 dollars, so any suggestions on that would be great.

I also believe that most of the computer is up to date and doesn't have virus or spyware on it. Maybe I need to tweak what is there all ready? Just let me know. Thanks for any info!
_________________

Last post after I installed the new card.

I bought a Saphire Radeon 9600pro Atlantis with 256 mb of Ram and installed it....and something isn't right. Dark Age of Camelot boots up so freakin slow it's not funny and when I want to zone/teleport to a different area, it takes like 3 minutes. Once you get zoned, it seems like it's not as choppy as it was with my mx440 64mb ram card but barely. I thought maybe I needed to update the driver for it, so I downloaded 6.4 for it and it didn't help at all, so I put the cd in and reverted back to the original driver. Is there another problem now? It never did this before with the old crappy card, it would zone no problem but was so choppy when a lot of people were around (like 20 sec worth of lag just to complete a turn around while standing in one spot) but this is worse. Am I missing a driver or did I download the wrong one? I just used what came with cd and searched for driver update. Do I need to update my driver for my mother board? Or do I need to chanage any bios settings? Any ideas or help in what to check for/try would be great. It seems in my head that it should be way better than the old card instead of way worse. Help please. Thanks

Any ideas would be great. I could really use step by step procedures when you reply if that is possible since I'm not great with puters. Like go here, do this, then this then this, look at this (you get there by doing this this and this) type stuff if possible.

I'm trying to resolve this before tomorrow since on Saturdays is the main play day for me. Thanks alot everyone!

Have you tried running any non-ATI branded drives for it, like the Omega Drivers?

http://www.omegadrivers.net

did you uninstall all the old drivers and get rid of everything fron the MX440

I looked everywhere in there and I don't see anything with nvidia on it, so I think it's completely gone. I dumped everything again and downloaded the ati stuff from the cd again. I also went to msi (my mb) and downloaded the newest driver and chipset that I could find (chipset was the same but the vga driver was ver 8.17 which was newer than the one on the cd) but it is still having issues. The zone time and start time of the game seems to have dropped a bit but still takes a lot longer than with the 64mb card.

Follow these steps:

1) Uninstall drivers for GFX card.. everything, ATI, nvidia whatever
2) Uninstall GFX card from device manager
3) Reboot
4) Delete ALL ATI/nVidia folders
5) Reboot AGAIN
6) Install drivers
7) Reboot
*8 ) Install control panel/CCC
*9) Reboot

The * means thats optional, the reason i say 2 reboots is so that windows will be forced to use its own drivers instead of waiting for you to install ATI ones.

I would also get the latest Hyperion (chipset) drivers from Via's own site, not MSI's.

Anyway this may seem stupid, but is Hardware Acceleration on full? Check in the display properties.

Also have you upped the screen-resolution or any of the eye-candy of the game?

You could also try re-installing the game!

One thing you can also do is download the drivers and unpack them but dont install them. Then go to your MMC and right click on unknown device or if its using the MS default the GFX card and do update driver. Then point to the foler you unpacked to. It will install JUST the base driver and not all the other crap the put in those things.

Dont know if you caught my last answer on your 'old' post, so here it is again:

"When was the last time you defragmented your hard drive?

Maybe these are times when the game is accessing the hard drive and because its all fragmented its taking so long."

Dan

Have you reinstalled the games? Moving from NV to ATI and DX7 to DX9 may have messed things up!

Also try running "dxdiag" -> start / run / type dxdiag
run the, very basic, tests.

I suspect you need to reinstall the game(s)

Ok did some stuff

I uninstalled everything I could find for nvidia and ati in remover programs. Then I removed the folders manually from my computer, then I uninstalled the 9600 from the device manager and the secondary driver from there also. Rebooted the system. Looked to make sure there wasn't any folders that had popped up again, and rebooted. I then canceled out of "found new hardware" and did the install from the latest package download from ati (6.4). I went to via and downloaded the newest chipset I could find (ver 5.08A) and installed and rebooted. Then I defragged the system and checked to make sure accel was on full.

Then I did dxdiag and there wasn't any problems found. I was wondering did I go from dx7 to dx9 because of cards? I thought I had dx9 already before this but not 100% sure.

2 things I seen on dxdaig. 1st was bios version said 7.00T which looked weird to me so I looked it up on MSI website and thier versions are titled like v1.9 for a kt4v-l ms-6712 ( couldn't find a listing for only kt4v which is all that is stamped on the mb= no l). So is there a problem there? 2nd I noticed that I have only 512 ram instead of a gig. Thought I had a gig but guess not, but still not sure that would cause my problems (I've heard of people playing it with 256 ram).

On ati it says to check and make sure that under irq that the vid card has a number by itself and it does.

I also havn't turned on any more "eye candy" than I had on and I'm still running the same rez (1200x1080 or whatever it is). I also havn't done anything in the ati catalyst control center.

I hope this gives everyone an idea or two. I didn't reinstall the game yet. It takes forever to do that, so it's a last resort type thing to do. I read the things on tech support and it says it's not supposed to mess up the games but of course that is just on paper lol.

Anyone have any other ideas or anything to try/ or look at? Thanks everyone.

Did you try the Omega drivers?

I have the site for it but the instructions for the omega drivers are all abbreviated and I can't figure them out. If they had an idiot version for me then I would try them. If you could tell me what they are then I would try them (like cp=control panel on windows or the card or something? ccc=? ddc=? display monitor cp=? The WDM drivers for VIVO and AIW cards= do I have these or need these? I must reinstall the agp chipset= is that the regular chipset driver for the mother board?

All you should need to do is download and install them. The other stuff is extra's above and beyond what you're trying to accomplish. Follow standard video card drive update proceedures as laid out earlier in this thread. Uninstall drivers, set to standard VGA, reboot. Install new drivers.

Hmm after trying to play my game for a while I came up with something new. 3 times the monitor went off and it said it didn't have any signal even though it was plugged in. There was a message also that came up something about vpu stopped getting signal to drive accelerator so it disabled it or something. Also now the whole computer is running slow and when you restart, the screen comes in from the top and fills down slow enough that you can see it go.

Does this mean the card is bad? Almost seems like it with the problems I'm having. Anyway to tell?

sounds more like driver corruption or windows corruption. When was the last time you installed windows?

Not sure when I installed windows last but I had to put a hd in it, so I would say Jan/Feb...somewhere in there.

Could be driver problems I suppose. I've downloaded and dumped, downloaded and dumped the card drivers. I've tried to update my chipset thru via like it was stated in post here. I was going to try the omega drivers but then it wasn't getting signal at all, so I thought maybe card was bad. My problem is, I'm not sure what drivers need updated because I don't know what they do. My motherboard is a couple years old and it's hard to find the drivers period. Plus like I stated, my bios version I have in there don't seem to match what it should look like either. What makes the problem so tough is my lack of knowledge. Like chipset, I don't know what a chipset is or why I would need to update it. I wish there was a program I could download that would search all the drivers I have and hardware I have and download and install all the updates lol.

So what should I try now? My windows should be good, or at least it was good with the old vid card. I don't know what to do.

So anyone come up with something for me to try now? The screen fill rate from top down on windows start up (like a printer does almost) and the loss of signal and monitor going blank give you all any ideas? Thanks

just an idea of something to try. try putting your old vid card in and do all the driver cleaning and installing for it. see if the problem is still there or not. If it is not there, then i dont know. but if the problem still exists, then it might be that something else was damaged in the change. jsut a thought.