CDaze Notes

Installing a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit causes a BSOD blue screen of death.  This was pretty frustrating as I’ve always run in to a problem with ATI drivers.  In XP the solution for me was to run Omega ATI drivers instead.  After many changes in the BIOS (Abit AV8 board) nothing would work but changing the video driver to standard VGA in the OS (from safe mode). Tweaks tried: reserving IRQ, disabled extra devices, clock settings and bus speeds… Nothing worked.   One thing that changed while upgrading this time was I put in another 2GB of ram.  Removing the ram proved not to cause the BSOD but I want to run with 4GB of ram.  Found the solution but not sure on what causes the problem.  I noticed my board with dual sided chip drops the clock to 333 instead of 400 when using 4GB.  Could be something with this.  What fixed the problem was manually entering how much ram is available to the OS at boot time.  You can access this setting with the msconfig tool.  Boot up into safe mode or standard VGA video.  Run msconfig by typing in ‘msconfig’ from the Start Run or search prompt.  Prompts to run as Admin are ok but in safe mode it should not prompt you.   Click the Boot Tab. Now put a check mark in the Maximum memory setting and select how much memory your system uses.  It should default to how memory the system is detecting.   Mine is 4GB or 4096MB.  Apply the changes and the system will need to reboot.  If everything works, your screen should flicker instead of BSOD.  For some reason my desktop theme was blank (black), probably from the auto repair options trying to fix it.  You can change your desktop themes back to normal though if that happens…  BTW the latest Vista x64 Catalyst drivers from ATI (AMD) loaded up fine.  Good luck.