Thinkpads Forum

I have spent much time recently wrestling with what looked like a sick TP - kernel crash (blue screen) or halt on every restart and regular crashes during normal working, but with no apparent provocation. All diagnostics gave hardware a clean bill of health. IBM replaced the system board under warranty anyway, but that didn't solve it.

Now, after a long series of trials, I have found the culprit - the latest version of the ATI FireGL 5200 driver (8.293.1-060913a-036475C), which I had installed a few weeks ago with TP Software Installer. Today I rolled back to the previous version (8.241.1-060324a-031947C) and so far all problems have disappeared. Reinstalling the latest driver brought back the problems.

But, if the driver is at fault, why has nobody else experienced the same problems? Or could the cause be more subtle? All advise and suggestions welcome!

PS. After the driver rollback I can't open the ATI Catalyst Control Center!

I can't confirm your problem, but I agree that ATI sucks at their driver. I have a T60p with vista and I experiance the frequent BSOD problem recently as well. I have some reasons to suspect that is the ATI's driver that causes the problem and I have yet to find one driver that can solve all the video adapter related problem...&)(^&^%&^

Anthony S wrote:I have spent much time recently wrestling with what looked like a sick TP - kernel crash (blue screen) or halt on every restart and regular crashes during normal working, but with no apparent provocation. All diagnostics gave hardware a clean bill of health. IBM replaced the system board under warranty anyway, but that didn't solve it.

Now, after a long series of trials, I have found the culprit - the latest version of the ATI FireGL 5200 driver (8.293.1-060913a-036475C), which I had installed a few weeks ago with TP Software Installer. Today I rolled back to the previous version (8.241.1-060324a-031947C) and so far all problems have disappeared. Reinstalling the latest driver brought back the problems.

But, if the driver is at fault, why has nobody else experienced the same problems? Or could the cause be more subtle? All advise and suggestions welcome!

PS. After the driver rollback I can't open the ATI Catalyst Control Center!

Many things can cause a driver to fail, the least of which is hardware. You main culprits are usually conflicting drivers or software. Have you checked your firewall? Even though this may seem unlikely, it happens. Your individual set of software may very well be the reason you are one of the few with such a problem. If there is a reason you need the newer drivers, you can try the Catalyst or Omega (my preference, they seem to work better when I've used them) drivers instead.

Omega-http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php
Catalyst-http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

What OS, Anthony? I'm running 8.343.0.0 on 32-bit Vista (dated Feb 9 2007) with no stability issues whatsoever. In fact, I spent a few hours yesterday re-acquainting myself with Homeworld 2. This is on my 2623-DDU T60p with the FireGL V5200.

I also ran across a problem withthe latest drivers. My machine refused to go to sleep, screen saver wouldn't kick in, etc. At least I didn't get the blue screen of death.
After rolling back the ATI driver to the previous, everything started working again.

T60p running Vista Premium.

Bob

Hi , I also notice problems after updating my ATI drivers, But I did a clean install on my ati driver,( I deleted the old drivers , accidentally)
Where can I get the old drivers for my 5200?

Thanks

I believe it is still in Lenovo website. Just browse the driver/software hierarchy section and you will see it.

Believe or have you done it before? I spent 5 minutes browsing their
site, looking for keywords, previous, old, but I don't see any.

Can you point me the way.

thanks

Seem like Lenovo removes it. I checked the driver matrix but it's not there:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62928
They used to have this feature on IBM website.

Anthony_S,
you mind sending me that old driver's package
I can't find that driver in my hdd thanks

ennma