ATI 4850 card, Adobe Reader and a mysterious monitor!

[cactusjack]

Hello everyone,

I have a quick question. My machine is a Dell XPS Studio - Intel i7 2.66GHz processor, 6GB RAM, ATI4850 card, Vista 64bit.

On odd occasions, when loading Adobe Reader (latest version), the graphics card driver will crash - screen goes blank for a second, and then Vista tells me that : "Display Driver atikmdag Stopped Responding And Successfully Recovered". This has been happening since I bought the PC in December - on average it may happen once or twice per day (or sometimes not at all).

I thought how bizzare - for Adobe to cause the crash.... The only game I play is World of Warcraft, and it never crashes when I play that!

I currently have Catalyst release 8.8 (Dell drivers installed on system). These are old drivers, but I was happy to put up with the problem, and so didn't bother updating the drivers (not after the Dell technician told me that sticking with Dell drivers was best since they are 'specially designed' for Dell's ATI cards..... load of rubbish I know). Oddly Dell have not updated their drivers since I purchased the PC....

I am assuming there is an issue with the graphics card driver or the catalyst control centre. Reading this thread, it seems that the ATI CCC is the issue: http://www.vistax64.com/vista-genera...er-freeze.html

So up to this point, i was happy to live with the problem. I can use the PC for work and for games, its all good overall.

Then this happens:

This evening I popped out for 2 hours, got back home, moved my mouse and the PC monitor came to life. Everything was ok for 5 seconds, and then the screen went blank. The PC seemed to be running ok - I just couldn't see anything on screen. I turned the monitor on and off - still nothing on the screen. Then the monitor was behaving oddly - soon it wouldn't turn off - i.e. screen is blank but the illuminated monitor LED light on the front panel wouldn't go off when pressing the on/off button!! Usually the monitor makes a beep sound when I turn it off, and now there was no beep. I turned the power on and off for the monitor at the plug. No luck - the monitor power returns and the monitor LED light doesn't go off, and no beep is present. Only rebooting the PC brought things back to normal....

My question is: has anyone experienced the latest issue I experienced above - and does that also sound like a CCC issue?

Any advice would be gratefully received.

[cactusjack]

Before anyone says install the latest ATI drivers .....

Does the latest issue sound like a problem for the graphics card when the PC monitor comes out of sleep mode? - could removing monitor sleep mode sound like a sensible remedy?

[cptwhite_uk]

The thing with the monitor not turning off properly when in standby mode has happened to me before, issue with the signal and not the monitor itself.

Uninstall CCC (seperate from the drivers), and uninstall the 8.8 drivers and install the latest off ATIs site. Problem sorted.