PC troublesFollow

I play FFXI on pc and I had to upgrade my computer. I have a Dell Demention 4100 with Windows ME and the standard vid card. I upgraded to Windows XP, added additional memory and a GeForce FX 5200 AGP 128MB DDR. I now have trouble, every once in a while the screen will turn blood red except for an 1/8 inch margin at the edge and if I dont log out quickly everything will freeze. I have tried reloading the driver that came with the new video card and I went to the GeForce website and downloaded a driver. After loading the driver from the website, NPC's would blink and the whole game seemed to run slower so I did a system restore to the driver that came with the card.

I also have an error message that there is a compatibility problem with my cd/dvd drive. I think this comes from the upgrade to Windows XP. Windows help and support provides me with a pop up that gives me the option to upgrade now (a link to purchase an upgrade) or save a link to my desktop to upgrade later. This occurs EVERY time I restart my pc. I have tried to block the pop up but can't seem to tell the pc that I don't want to upgrade.

If anyone has any suggestions on what might be wrong I'd love to hear them please help me out



Edited, Wed Jan 26 17:26:31 2005 by Rhyus

Was this an OS(ME) over OS(XP) upgrade? I would suggest performing a clean install of Windows XP if that's the case. Also, the flickering problem that you're running into sounds similar to what was happening to me. The solution to this was to avoid the 1024x1024 Background resolution. As you know in the FFXI Config 512x512 is default and looks abosolutely horrendous, 1024x1024 is much crisper but seems to cause flicker and invisbility issues for some reason for my card (GeForce FX 5200 256MB AGP DDR). My suggestion to correct that problem would be to bump down the background resolution through registry to 768x768, which in turn will help relieve some processing if your current setting is 1024x1024. You can do that by using "RegEdit" from your 'Start->Run':

i) Open the Registry Editor.
ii) Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/PlayOnlineUS/SquareEnix/FinalFantasyXI/
iii) Change values for the keys '003' and '004' to hex values equivalent to the desired resolution in decimal. (768x768 you change the values to 300) You'll notice the output of your entry to the right of the hex value when you click ok , hence it should be (768) next to it. These values will be either 200(512) or 400(1024) depending on what you've selected for background resolution using the FFXI Config Utility. Hope this helps.