I have a Diamond Viper V500 Video card which seems to be causing me major problems and prevents me from running my FS and games.System:--Celeron 450 (o-clocked)-198Mb Ram-Win98I think the problems with the video first appeared arround the same time I installed a CDRW, however that seemed to be a straight forward install and I can't be certain about the timing.The only way I can run FS or any game for that matter, is if I go to system tools and reduce the hardware acceleration slider to the first mark, (which gives me 6-7fps on my Celeron 450 :( ). If I try to set this to the normal hardware acceleration Max, or if I enable hardware acceleration within FS, the system hangs, requiring a cold boot. It seems that hardware acceleration is the culprit but I don't know how or why and what to do.I have tried :-1/ Upgrading the Video drivers2/ Re-loaded the old video drivers3/ Physically removed card and re-inserted. 4/ Have installed the latest directXI'm really just trying to fluke it!Even if I go into Sandra and try to access the video test utilities, it will hang instantly if I've got acceleration on. Even if I try to access the card's advanced options it will hang, if hardware acceleration is enabled. In fact, the only way to access these menus is to first reduce hardware acceleration, then re-boot and go in.I have no idea what's wrong or what to try next, so please help me get my FS life back!Thanks,Nick

I think you already know you have a very marginal system for running today's graphics intensive games. Your graphics card is quite antiquated, you have a slow Celeron CPU, and not enough RAM.I think your system is doing the best it can under the circumstances. Make sure you are only running bare essentials. Visit http://www2.whidbey.net/djdenham/index.htm on how to disable non-essential programs before you boot your computer. You will have to still be very conservative when you run the high powered games.

Thanks for your reply. I should mention that it was running FS2000 just fine previously, so it obviously has a problem now, and it crashes when accelerated graphics is enabled. In other words, there is definately a problem there and not just a case of having a slow machine.

Did you mean FS2002 or FS2000? FS2000 is not as graphics intensive as FS2002.I tried looking up the specs on a Diamond Viper 500 and the closest I could come was a Viper 550. The specs page was unavailable. My daughter has a Diamond Viper 770 in her computer and it choked when using the default drivers. I found some newer drivers on Diamond's website http://www.diamondmm.com/support/diamond/d...Legacy_Graphics . I have since installed NVidia driver on her Viper 770 since it uses the Vanta TNT chips.Make sure you are uninstalling the drivers properly. Also you might use Detonator Destroyer to remove all the residual stuff left in your registry. Visit http://www.guru3d.com/ for drivers and DD.Hope you can get it solved!

Yes, sorry it is a V550 and I am running FS2000.I loaded the detonator software and followed the instructions. It did delete a few files during this process so I was hopefull. I also d/loaded the latest driver for this card and installed it later.After re-boot I entered FS2000 which was running in un-accelerated mode. All ok so far. Then I enabled hardware acceleration and the FPS went up to 28-40fps for a short while ( :) ) then 4 seconds later the sim froze and I had to cold boot again. Oh well....Worth a shot though, so thanks again!

Hey Nick, I'm not a expert, but when I install the FS 2002, I've a gain in performance over the old 2000, because the engenie of 2002 is better. They work great in low end sistems. I think you should try it!Regards!