My laptop is junk (kindof)
 

I have a 3 year old Alienware laptop computer that I want to get rid of, but there is a problem with it. The video drivers with the Radeon 9600Pro graphics card cause my laptop to completely lock up often. I have the latest drivers from Alienware loaded to no avail. I want to get laptop running so I can sell and get something smaller and lighter. Gaming is of no interest to me anymore.

Any advice would be appreciated.

You might try and find an older set of drivers, from around the time your laptop came out...

The ones I have are the latest for my series...but I could see about loading the original drivers.

That would be the first thing I would try, followed by checking if you're possiby overheating. You could open up the laptop and clean any dust/buildup off of the heatsinks in there. How do you know it's the drivers for the videocard that are locking things up, and not the videocard itself?

How do you know that the video card drivers are causing the os to fail?

I'll start out simple,
What OS?
Have you installed, and kept the OS patched/updated?
If you are certain it is the video device driver, you can rollback the device driver to the older version.

Other things I would do.

Download and use "ccleaner", use this to clean out the OS and fix any registry issues.
Download and use "adaware", clean out the spyware/malware.
Download and use "avg free", scan it, make sure it's good to go.
Defrag it till you see the glorous blue.

Come back here and post how that works. It's all free, and either way it can't hurt.

BSOD with ativ2diag.(???) listed as cause of error 9/10 times it locks up. OS is XP SP2 with close to the latest updates. I run NortonFirewall and Antivirus on current definitions too.

I've gotten the same problems with older drivers too and it wasn't like this when I used some of these drivers years ago.

Hmm yes you are correct in your assumption. It seems as if your video device driver is the cause. "Ati2dvag" causing mr blue screen. The solution here is not simple, you need to get in Dr. Watson to diagnose what exactly is going on. "Dr. Watson" is XP's internal debugging tool to help correct the specific issue. Once it creates a log file you need to decipher it to continue. yadda yadda.. .

My suggestion which will be a pain, and my usual method, is a clean install. I say this because by the time you figure out how to create a correct debug log file, try to fix the error, and move on; there is no guarantee you will have found the root cause of the issue.

Backup your files, re-format the hard drive, re-install. There are never any guarantee?s that it will for sure fix the issue, but for 90% of all software problems it will do the job.

If you do this, use the drivers that came with the computer, the new ati drivers may be the real cause, and installing them again may bring the issue around full circle.

Wait, I just re-read your first post.

Don't use the alienware drivers. Before anything else go to ATI itself and install their latest drivers for your device.

Alienware, is probably providing you with the same older driver.

Try OMEGA Drivers

Funny thing is, ATI's site doesn't have any drivers for my card.

What is Omega?

Here's a little aside, although it might not help in your case...

I was having big problems with my desktop computer locking up for a long time. I have a Radeon 9800 video card, and after playing games for a while it would lock up without fail, and on reboot the error message would say my video card drivers were the issue. I updated drivers, bought a $40 heat sink for my video card, new fans for my case, I tried everything. I was this >||< close to buying a new nVidia video card...

This went on for about a year, until I finally read on a forum somewhere a guy had problems with his AGP voltage which caused his lockups (with the same video card). So, I went into BIOS and upped my AGP bus voltage from 1.50V to 1.55V, and it fixed it! Haven't had a video card related lock up since...

So there's that, for what it's worth. I don't know if you can even adjust that kind of thing with your BIOS though since it's a laptop.

omegadrivers.net

they supply modified drivers for nVidia and ATI graphics cards.

The Catalyst drivers that came with an ATI card I had wouldnt work right. I switched to OMEGA and that card ran smooth.

Awesome. Downloading right now. I'll post up my results.

Well, I loaded the Omega drivers and so far they are working great. I will definitely bookmark that site for future reference.