I am having some serious problems with my computer. First I am having problems getting into my Catalyst control center. It let me access it at first, but now I have no way to access it as it tell me I am not the administrator even though I am. Second I am having serious gaming issues on my computer. I have an intel pentium 4 2.80 processer with 1gb of ram and I just recently installed ATI radeon x1650 with 512 mb and games are running horrible. even FATE which is supposed to run on pentium 3 800 mhz is being laggy. WoW ran OK and even Anarchy online is running so completely terrible. my OS is Windows Vista.

Did you install the Vista drivers for your ATI card?

Did you uninstall all previous ATI drivers?

I am pretty sure that I uninstalled the drivers for the ATI and then re installed them and it gives me the same errors. I am also pretty sure that my ATI card is updated fully.

Would not hurt to try again.

http://ati.de/support/driver.html

Choose Vista and either 32 or 64 bit as per your system. Then choose your precise card.

Uninstall any ATI software listed under start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs prior to installing new drivers.

Have these problems only started since you installed the Radeon X1650? Has this PC always been running Vista or did you upgrade to that recently as well?

Incidentally, 1GB RAM isn't much for a good gaming experience on Vista. Have you tried checking your RAM usage when you're finding these games running badly?

What kind of computer do you have? If it was a Dell, HP or any other already built computers, it should tell you whether or not it is Vista Compatible. All the computers that I've seen, have either had Dual Core, or Athlon's.....I'm not sure if the P4 is cutting it though, it might pose as a problem.

Originally Posted by jakeyeager

.....I'm not sure if the P4 is cutting it though, it might pose as a problem.

Minimum specs for Vista Home Premium are a PIII 800MHz with 512MB RAM - recommended specs are a PIII 1GHz or higher and 1GB RAM or more. Personally, I wouldn't be keen to put it on anything less than a P4 2.0GHz but I haven't had enough experience of it to say that with any authority.

For comparison, I've had 2 experiences of Vista in the last fortnight. The first was an Acer laptop with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. It was a Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz with 1GB RAM and I was very disappointed. Of course, as with any other manufacturer, Acer had bundled it with loads of other applications, utilities and overweight drivers to slow it down! My other experience was when I did a clean install of Vista Business on a Pentium D 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM for a customer last week. I was really impressed with that .... but it was literally only running Vista, drivers and Symantec Anti-Virus.

I'm going to start a thread in the Vista board about this as I think it would be interesting to hear comparisons from other forum members as well: http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread...349#post133349