Geforce2 MX400!! Need help badly!

[Pondac]

I posted this in Ask Mudcrush, but thought I would put it here, too. Couldn't hurt I suppose.

Ok, I got a problem here. I am currently playing EQon my laptop, which I hate with a passion! It gets too hot from running a very processor heavy game for long periods of time. So, I need to get my desktop working again. So, here we go with the problem!

I have an ABIT motherboard with a athlon TBird clocked at 1.4 GHz.
It has 512 MB RAM, SBlive
blah blah blah you get the picture. Typical machine

It has a Geforce2 mx400 video card. The one with 64MB memory. It's also a Visiontek card. The machine had a pretty fresh install of windows XP professional and was running basic windows display drivers that were very outdated. I was running newest direct x so I decided to upgrade the video card drivers. I did this because EQ was not running at all on it. everytime I would run the game I'd get booted to my desktop saying some bullshit about EQ may have crashed, blah blah blah. I would also get blue screen stop errors with references to the video card driver. So. I went with nvidia's newest forceware drivers. Once I installed them after wiping the old drivers the system became very unstable and would crash quite frequently. Next, I used system recovery wiped the old drivers again and went with windows update drivers for my system. Same damn thing! So, I did the whole process again and went with the Visiontek drivers for the card, and low and behold, same freaking thing! The only drivers that work with the system are the basic windows XP drivers that are outdated. But, when I run any games that work the system hard they crash. So, all the computer is good for at that point is surfing the internet and stuff. So, I did a fresh install of windows xp pro. I started doing the hundreds of windows update stuff and then went to install video card drivers. I tried the nvidia drivers and the visiontek drivers and keep getting the same bullshit! System just crashes frequently. I can't get to try EQ cause the system crashes before I even get to load it.

After doing error reporting, it just says a display driver caused the problem. But I am using all drivers that are recommended for the Geforce2 mx400. I cannot figure out for the life of me why the damn computer won't take any upgraded display drivers! I keep doing system restore back to the crappy drivers so my parents won't get pissed cause the computer won't run, but I wanna play EQ on it, and there's no way that'll happen with outdated drivers. So, I can't think of anything else to try!

I also did some research on IRQ assignments, and found out my video card is sharing an IRQ with some other devices like my ethernet card and sound card. But I just switched the PCI slot on them and got the video card on an IRQ by itself, and it didn't solve a thing! The video card is an AGP card BTW, forgot to mention that.

I'm at the end of my rope here, and can't think of anything else to try. Do I just have a bad card? Or is the AGP slot on my motherboard card bad? I don't know. Please help! I want to get this system running right, so any suggestions you might have would be greatly appreciated. I even tried all this while setting my BIOS to AGP 2X AND 4X, which are both supported by the card, but to no avail has done me no good. Please help me!! I beg you! I can't stand this failure any longer. I've always been very good with my computers, but this problem has beaten me to death, and I don't know what else I can do to try and conqure it. Thank you very much!

ADDED POST::

I also saw an EQ crash problem that was pretty close to mine on another post. It said he had crash problems with EQ saying, EQ has detected that your client may have crashed, and I had that a few times using the outdated drivers. he said updating the firmware on his router solved the probelm, so after looking netgear says people using the router that I own are highly recommended to update the firmware, so I am going to do that when I get home. So, I may be able to somewhat run EQ on it after that.

But this still does not solve my problems where the system gets unstable without running EQ when I upgrade the display drivers. So I still need help with that. I doubt updating the router's firmware will help my system, but it still needs done. Please help!

[10sun]

load up a character in a lowbie zone and drop your clip plane down to like 25%. Load up your main and test that out.

I run into client crashes as well in PoP / GoD zones because I have a low end vid card in my laptop as well.

Turn off a lot of player models as well.

-Adam

[Tuggan]

and turn off the new stupid sky.

[Pondac]

I don't know if you guys missed the main problem, but most of it is not EQ related. Just crashes in general caused by the video card driver. Most of the time I load a driver and turn on the machine to test out EQ and the computer crashes before the patcher gets done running.

Anyone else wanna try and help me out??

Just please read the post instead of blurting out some 2 line answer that's not gonna help me at all. Thanks.

[Nebulis01]

Are you running the visontek drivers or the nVidia reference drivers?

Goto http://www.nvidia.com and download the latest (56.72) driverset for the card and install those, hopefully that will help the problem. also make sure your chipset drivers for the mainboard are up to date (If its a VIA chipset, head to http://www.viaarena.com)

If you need anything else, post here