Unofficial fix for the BSOD problem for ATI users

Well, here's an unofficial fix which I've found solves 99.9% of the Blue Screen of Death problems for users with Ati graphics card problems, here's a little guide on how to eradicate the problem until ArenaNet or ATI solves the issue in another driver issue, it IS a driver issue which is causing the bug, I'm fairly certain. (Or a conflict, although that's less likely as all sorts of motherboard types and chipsets have been having the same problem)

Just before we begin, if you have an Ati 9XXX card this tutorial will suit you, as with 8XXX and 7XXX cards, and no doubt the Xxxx series also, it's well worth a try :

1. Download the Catalyst 5.5 drivers from the Ati Website (For Windows XP/NT Users):
http://www.ati.com/

2. Download Driver Cleaner 3 from here:
http://www.drivercleaner.net/dc.htm

3. Install Driver Cleaner 3, but do not use it yet.

4. Uninstall the Ati Display drivers using the good old fashioned method (Start-> Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs) Ati Display Driver should be near the top of the list, restart your computer after the installation has finished.
(Your Windows should by now be using only Standard VGA drivers, the resolution maybe a little smaller than usual, do not worry, this is normal. You will also get some 'Windows has found some new hardware messages', just close the boxes when they come up, this is just the graphics card being detected.

5. Run Driver Cleaner 3, select ATI from the dropdown box and click on "Clean"
(Warning: Ensure that ATI is selected before you click clean, mainly because Driver Cleaner has the option to wipe out other system drivers if you select the wrong manufacturer from the list, and this can cause huge system instability)

6. Restart your computer once the cleaning is finished (After clicking "close" in Driver Cleaner)

7. Install the 5.5 drivers, restart the computer, play GW and hopefully your problems should be solved..

8. Enjoy GW how it should be!


Also, here's a few user suggested tips:

Suggested by Hysteria- If you have a Radeon 9600 card, ensure Fast Writes are on in the BIOS, for other cards it wouldn't cause much difference if it was off, but if you're having severe stability problems, maybe worth a try enabling it..
(Thanks for the tip Hysteria! )

Suggested by Zakarr- Use memtest (http://www.memtest86.com/) to test your computers memory for errors and problems.
(Thanks for the tip Zakarr! )



Well, this should help some of you technology newbies in playing GW if you previously had this issue, it should work, it did on my system and quite a few other systems who's owners I've suggested it to, here's my system specifications anyways:

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Overclocked to 3200+ (2.2GHZ)
1GB PC3200 RAM
Abit NF7-SV2.0 Motherboard
Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 120GB SATA HDD


Also, stay clear of the Catalyst 5.6, 5.7 and mainly the lower than 5.5 versions for Guild Wars, these can cause other problems, and the 5.6 and 5.7 driver series caused the BSOD in my case (Plus in other systems also). From what I've found out the 5.5 drivers are really the best for GW performance and stability, and use this tutorial at your own risk, it should more than likely work, it has for myself and other users.

(P.S: I will not be held responsible for any system issues caused by this tutorial, the actions shown here should not cause any systemproblem/instability if followed correctly).

Also DC3 can be used for clearing out other uninstalled drivers, so if you've previously had any other cards installed into your machine, e.g. say an Nvidia card and have uninstalled the drivers, select Nvidia from the dropdown box and it should clean the remnants from the Nvidia drivers..

If you have any questions, then just ask me...

Stephen.

Good sound advice. I use the cat uninstaller utility available from ATI's site before I install a new cat version. No matter what make your video card is everyone should unistall the previous version of drivers and clean up any remnants with driver cleaner. I currently use the 5.7's on my 9800 Pro with no issues nor have I had any with any version and Guild Wars. The 5.7's actually have a a few optimizations for the 128 meg cars which some of you might see a descent boost in performace from. Btw, 9600's seem to work more stable with fast writes enabled, at least thats what I have heard.

Yep, one good thing mentioned there is if you have a 9600 ensure fast writes are enabled, cheers for bringing that to my mind Hysteria

I suppose the tut varies from card to card, which is why you're probably having no problems with the 5.7, but if you're having problems with that version, by all means the tutorial may help!

I've never used the Cat uninstaller utility, mainly because I don't want my Ati Tray Tools to be uninstalled by it, even then I don't think it totally eradicates the old driver dll's etc from the system, which DC3 does. All it does is just uninstall any ATI related program (E.g. the control panel, ATI Tray tools etc)

Actually, it's not ATI, it's specific to the user's system. I use the X800 XT PE and have never ever experienced BSOD ever since I started playing GW in Apr 2005.

It's the only game which is doing it with my system, installing the 5.5 drivers solved the problem for me and it solved the problem for others.

If YOU'RE not having any problems with the other drivers installed, then this advice isn't needed, although Driver Cleaner works with other things, but if you're having BSOD problems, then by all means try this if you have an ATI card.

I had crashing problems, BSODs, white cubes and things like that. BSODs were common especially at pre-searing. Characters replaced by white cubes happened almost daily. Crashing especially middle of fights like kick to desktop and throwing error message window. I blamed Guild Wars from it because other more heavy games like Doom 3, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 and UT2004 ran without problems.

But guess what? I finally ran memtest and it gave me 3 errors in 15 minutes. One of my memory modules is faulty and I removed it. I have played GW about a week after removing the module and all those problems are gone. Now GW works flawlessly. I used to get problems daily.

Quite strange but I guess that Guild Wars use memory differently. I strongly recommend to check your memory modules. Even if memtest doesn't report errors, remove modules one by one and see if anything changes.

BTW: I have ATI card. X800 XL and Cat 5.7 drivers.

Well I have an X800XL and have tested all driver versions from 5.4(which came with the card), 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7, and I have seen very little difference with any of them, I have no BSOD, and never have. It has to be system specific, don't get me wrong your advice is ok, but not every ATI card user has problems...


My specs are..

AMD643700(san diego)@stock
Asus A8V motherboard
1gb of g-skill le
2x400g seagate barracuda's
X800xl

EDIT - Also StephenD I notice your Athlon XP is overclocked, most if not all BSOD can be because of this, and I know this especially with Guild wars because, I bought my San Diego chip for this and Guild wars was a bit touchy with any form of overclock..., You chip, combined with maybe memory conflicts, due to your overclock can cause this problem you have had

I'm using an ATI X800XL on WinXP SP2 and using the NGO optimized 5.7 drivers.

The plain vanilla 5.7 drivers were OK, but I like the NGO package because it installs ATI tools at the same time with a lot of standard tweaks. The ATI tools also provides on screen display of a variety of stats, including frame rates, GPU temps, and heapsize.

Everything is working fine with the 5.5 drivers now, so I'm assuming it was just a driver related issue, the memtests have came up fine, as have temps etc.

The overclock is stable in other games and XP, and also in GW.

Good one mate, i'm glad it's working for you, and your possibly right it was a driver issue, but also i'm kind of right because other versions of the cat drivers are conflicting with something in your system, and rolling back to the 5.5's worked for you. It wouldn't just be the driver versions and if i were you, i'd want to know whats wrong.......

This hasnt worked for me

What's your system specs?

Sorry, I should've mentioned that this'll fix the problem in some configurations, and it won't in others..

(Slightly Off-Topic)
I did a similar thing with Nvidia and the BSOD on exit.
If you do the same thing, get the newest (non-beta) driver from nvidia then uninstall, reboot, run driver cleaner, reboot, install drivers.

It seemed to clear up the issue (or make it happen far less that I don't notice it) with my pc.

Ok, found wood to knock on... I have never experienced BSOD with my 9250 ATI card or any other problems whatsoever on any game. I'd say GW is probably the most modern game that I run (soon to share time with Warworld ).

My question is for all the ATI knowledgeable people. When I first installed this card a few months ago, I used the driver from the installation cd that came with it. Anyhow, the instruction manual (yes I'm a n00b to this) recommended that I don't ever change drivers unless I run into problems. I experience little to no lag and am enjoying a stunning visual experience with every game I play. So the question... What is the benefit of upgrading Catalyst with each new release? Sorry if it's a simple answer, but I'm looking at it with the If it ain't broke, don't fix it mindset, yet I'm curious on what I'm missing out on.

Thanks,
Edge

<- Uses catalyst 5.7

As I have said before and Ill say again, I dont believe that the drivers alone are the cause of many peoples problems. There has to be some sort of underlying conflict that are resolved by a roll back. It would be tough to isolate though since so many things are effected by driver installations.

I've been trying to switch back to Catalyst 5.5 for awhile now, but the system seems to vehemently resist this idea. After removing the old drivers and running Driver Cleaner, I go to install Catalyst 5.5, only to be told that the 'required components' are missing. I have no idea how I could circumvent this.

Most Excellent. this fix has seemed to work for me. I used Guild Wars for 6 hours straight for the very first time since getting the game. Thanks!!!

Still cant seem to get this to work, as I end up getting an NF error telling me there's no video driver when I go to install Catalyst 5.5, even though the basic VGA driver is installed and working perfectly. Go figure.

I had that happen to me as well. What i did was go into windows in safe mode, remove the drivers from control panel there. run driver cleaner from there too. Then I rebooted and reinstalled the driver which worked. Good luck!

Tried it. Same problem. "INF Error, Video driver not found" *shrug*

Not much I can do, I guess.

I got a new comp recently, it has an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics card, I also get booted about every ten minutes from GW, could the graphics card be the problem?

Sounds to me like you have a mobile device that is not offically supported by catalyst. Goto http://www.driverheaven.net/ and find the mod tool. It will update the installer for catalyst by adding your selected card into the inf files of the installer. Then you can install any version of catalyst you like just follow the directions and you should be fine.

http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/ <- mobility modder

Generic Vga driver will always work but only in 16bit color as in 16 colors not 16 bit high color.

If it is not a mobility device or one of those listed as supported by the modder then you may need to hunt down a remove the ati support folders on your computer and local inf files although driver cleaner does a fairly decent job of removing the installed drivers in most cases.

So in response to that you have an onboard video processor. While atis claims maybe true and it is based on pci express standards it is the first in its class designed for a 64bit architecture. So I honestly can't say yay or nay on if its the card or not, but imho its a good chance that it has something to do with the chipset or cooling since it is a first generation product.

Thanks muchly. This actually worked to install the drivers.

..Unfortunately, it didn't fix the problem. :/

I no longer have a Radeon 9600 now, I'm using a Geforce 6800, and thus I cannot provide anymore 'fixes' etc for Ati cards..

Had similar problems with my ATI 9550GT 256mb (9600 in all but packaging) card with Neverwinter Nights.

Found that the Omega drivers fixed all my problems. They are standard 5.7 ATI drivers with all the tweeks optimised, so no real compatibility issues - even ATI beta testers approve.

Try it - you may find your problems resolved.

full ack! updating my ATI drivers from 3.7 to 5.7 solves it. no crash since

I have a ATI 9800 Pro and still had problems after trying the omega drivers and latest catalyst ones. Narrowed it down to a heat issue by taking the side panel off the computer while I played guild wars and didn't have any problems. I added an aftermarket cooler (newegg.com - $13) to the video card and smooth sailing ever since.

Just a quick note (even though I think I already commented on this once but wanted to make sure), after ATI returned my repaired card to me, I got the game to stop crashing by turning off VPU recovery inside the ATI Catalyst control panel.

.. while playing Guild Wars, I suffer an unusual error. I'll be running along--and my computer won't crash. Rather, my.. monitor will suddenly enter sleep mode? And it won't come out of it until I reset the computer. The game continues to run in the background. This problem only happens while in Guild Wars.

It happened after I updated the drivers on my brother's AIW 8500. Prior to that, the game was having different problems--which, while cured by the driver update, have now transformed into the aforementioned.

Any ideas?

I've been coming across the same problem. I start Guild Wars, and can play for about 5 min, then screen freezes, gets all jumbled up, and goes into sleep mode, where I can't get out until I restart. Now, I didn't have this problem till this morning. I haven't installed anything for the last week or so, but I did finally turn off my computer for the first time last night, and I'm rulling out drivers, cause FEAR still works. So, did GW update in the past 24 hours?

hrmm, it might be that your graphics hard is overheating and just shuts down. any thoughts on catalyst 5.12?

well, I just upgrade from 5.7 (NGO optimized; didn't have any probs) to 5.12 (omega), GW runs fine. ATI tray tools still give probs, so make sure you quit it before launching GW.
(ATI 9600 mobility, 128)

Did anybody get this fixed? It is happening to me now as well?

how do i know what my ati card is? i want to update it but don't know which type i have

Go to Start, Run and type dxdiag. Direct X will tell you what card you have.

A question of my own, is Guild Wars Open GL or Direct 3D? Cause if its Open GL that would expalin some problems (ATi isnt doing so great in Open GL at the moment though I think i read that they are working on it).

GW and San Andreas give me the VPU Recover problem. (My biggest problem with GW is however my modem (DLink 504T) I think i need to replace it even though its new, cause either GW or Ventrilo (which i only use in GW) is causing my comp to freeze after a while.

it's probably just your computer

i am haveing the same prob my monitors go into sleep or it just locks the vid card i can still hear the game going . it only happens in GW i can play doom3 and warhammer40k with no problems i updated to the lates drivers and still didnt fix it im try going to the 5.5 im running an ATI X600XT. i havent had any problems till about 2 weeks ago and the are becomeing more of a problem i can play for 3min or i can play for 45min but in the end i get the same probs any help would be nice ty

update
well my vid card is going out so im sending it in for repairs but i did find a temp fix though so i could still play GW i d/l ATI tool and underclocked my card and it works nicely