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Tuesday, 26 April 2005

Death to bloatware [Spiny]

If you're an ATi Radeon owner you've probably come accross their control panel replacement that is the "Catalyst Control Centre". Designed primarily for taking up the maximum amount of your system ram, this pointless bloated alternative to the displays control panel provides driver tweakage in a kindergarten oriented graphically OTT .NET based interface. By now you've probably guessed I don't like it much :) Just about the only thing that is any real use in it, is the application profiles.
Fortunateley, if you're after something a bit more sophisticated than the ATi vanilla control panel (which you can get back, just by uninstalling CCC btw) there's other options. I did use Rage3dTweak but always hated the interface, but now the ATi Tray Tool has matured enough to be a better alternative. It supports game profiles, overclocking etc & just sits in the tray not taking up much memory (at least compared to the CCC) It also supports all those other hidden driver settings that you will never use unless you spend your life running 3dMark, and it dosen't take up 16 Slimabytes* of memory. Oh yeah, and it works.
Which is nice.
* 1 Slimabyte = 1024^1024 bytes.

2 comments:

  1. I simply installed the standard not CCC drivers which are available for download off the exact page the bloatware drivers are on.
    That system tray tool sounds ace though, cheers for that.

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  2. I've found ATT causes problems with Norton Antivirus but picked up these workarounds from the guru3d forums:Users will need to put all the NAV exe files into the exception list in the Auto2d/3d window.Uncheck "Agressive 3d detection" (but loose the abillity to force triple buffering).

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