New machine, older GeForce, City of Heroes problem.

I'll try to make this succinct. I bought a new machine, a Sony Vaio. I had an older eMachines that I had installed a GeForce 4600 Ti in. I've been playing City of Heroes since beta, no problems.

I fired up the new machine, which came with a Radeon 9200, 128MB card. I knew the GF4600 was a better card, but I figured I'd give it a shot. The quality was lacking, so I installed the GF4600 and removed the Radeon. I installed the most recent official drivers from nVidia. I started experiencing freezes for up to thirty seconds, where even the cursor wouldn't move. I knew I had older drivers on my older machine, so I decided to uninstall and go back to a previous level. I used DriveCleaner to remove the ATI drivers and used it between nVidia installed. I tried a 4x series, three 5.x series, and two 6.x series of drivers, including the beta 66 drivers from guru3d.com. It still happens with all versions.

I'm running WinXP home, SP1 (not 2, I made sure), Directx9b, 3.0 gHz proc, 512MB RAM, 160 gig hard drive (7200rpm), and currently the 66 set of drivers.

This most recent attempt, I decided to let everything freeze away and see what happened. XP ended up rebooting itself after freezes became longer and longer with less time in between. On reboot, I ended up with a message telling me the device failed to draw properly.

I'm leaning towards thinking this is a driver issue, and also thinking about loading up the Omega version of nVidia's 5x series of drivers. I've looked at bios settings to make sure AGP settings were running at 4x, etc, but I really don't think that has anything to do with it. I also increased the virtual memory size to 1024 min from 700something (the default).

Does anyone have any ideas about what else to try? I'm reaching the limit of my knowledge.

Dave

 

What about power or heat?