Swapping nVidia to ATI card

Post by **Foo** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:41 am

Need to swap from nVidia to ATI card on my dad's old athlon system.

Do I just need to uninstall the nvidia drivers before proceeding, or is it more involved than that?

Reinstall is not immediately an option, though chances are it will happen in a few months anyway.

Post by **MKJ** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 11:30 am

removing the drivers should be enough.

Post by **o'dium** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 11:59 am

MKJ wrote:removing the drivers should be enough.

I wouldn't count on it. I've found that going from one type to another, even after a clean remove of drivers, still either messes things up or gives poor performance.

If your dads not gonna be playing games, go for the easy option of just removing old/installing new drivers. If he wants it for a gaming PC, I really do suggest you do a fresh install of windows.

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 12:33 pm

o'dium wrote: If he wants it for a gaming PC, I really do suggest you do a fresh install of windows.

lol, no.

remove the old drivers and clear anything in the reg regarding Nvidia and you're good.

Post by **Foo** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 12:41 pm

Seems fine. I uninstalled the nvid drivers then uninstalled the card via the hardware manager, rebooted in with the new card and went from there.

His flight sim framerates have gone up a fair few notches. Jumped from a GF2MX to a Radeon 9000

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 1:23 pm

Foo wrote:Seems fine. I uninstalled the nvid drivers then uninstalled the card via the hardware manager, rebooted in with the new card and went from there.

His flight sim framerates have gone up a fair few notches. Jumped from a GF2MX to a Radeon 9000

FORMAT C: BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

Post by **bitWISE** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 1:36 pm

I always just power down, switch the cards, and install the new drivers when it boots back up.

Post by **SOAPboy** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 1:38 pm

bitWISE wrote:I always just power down, switch the cards, and install the new drivers when it boots back up.

Yeah basicly. And 99 times out of a 100 it works just fine.

Post by **+JuggerNaut+** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 1:40 pm

SOAPboy wrote:
bitWISE wrote:I always just power down, switch the cards, and install the new drivers when it boots back up.
Yeah basicly. And 99 times out of a 100 it works just fine.

eh, uninstalling the drivers is just good practice all around me thinks. couple extra mouse clicks, oh no.

Post by **SOAPboy** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 1:42 pm

+JuggerNaut+ wrote:
SOAPboy wrote:
bitWISE wrote:I always just power down, switch the cards, and install the new drivers when it boots back up.
Yeah basicly. And 99 times out of a 100 it works just fine.
eh, uninstalling the drivers is just good practice all around me thinks. couple extra mouse clicks, oh no.

And im not arguing that. Fact is itll still work without doing that. maybe not as well, but it works.

Post by **Foo** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 1:42 pm

You can run into some windows xp activation issues if you end up where windows has to detect the same card over a few times, so I knew I'd have to avoid running any nvidia stuff while the ATI card was plugged in.

If a card gets tagged as generic or incorrectly then later as the correct card that seems to add more points to your re-activation score. Happened when I was building a PC last month, where I had to phone up to activate a brand new copy of XP because the installation went made the first time round and detected all the devices as the wrong things.

Post by **dzjepp** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 3:47 pm

drivercleaner is a great tool for getting rid of all tracers of old drivers. http://www.drivercleaner.net/

don't mind the pay version, the free one still works damn well.