[steph]

Hi,
Do somebody can help me? I have a recurrent problem with my G3 Blue and white computer. It freeze very often with Painter and Photoshop when I work with the Wacom tablet. I suspect the ATI rage 128 driver, when I turn off the driver, the problem disappear but monitor refresh is much slower. Any solutions?

[Pat]

Yes, there is a conflict with certain programs when the ATI Graphics Accelerator Extension is used. I spent about a week tracking down the same issue. It's a nasty bug which comes and goes seemingling at random, but always in conjunction with the Wacom tablet. In my case it was MUCH worse in Painter --almost never appearing in Photoshop.

Solution: Upgrade your software. ATI has not released a new driver which addresses the issue, but both Photoshop 5.5+ and Painter 7 have addressed the issue. OS9 might help as well, if you're not on it already. If you can't upgrade to the latest versions of the software, downgrade your ATI drivers. Version 3.8 of the Graphics Accelerator IS compatible with your programs. This is the version which shipped with the G3 and is on the original OS install disk. AFAIK, the problem was introduced with the Radeon Drivers, somewhere around v. 5.X.X of the driver. Since almost all the improvements in the ATI drivers are only 3D related, this shouldn't have any major impact.

Also, you can do what you're doing now which is to simply disable the offending extension and suffer with non-accelerated 2D refeshes. Not pretty, but it works great.

Hope this helps,

-Pat

[bigfoot]

Pat is right,
you may also want to upgrade your "memory". The programs your working with
demand an enourmous amount of memory and a standard G3 may now not be able
to handle the demand. Especially if you are working with the most updated versions
of Photoshop and Painter.
You can purchase menory and "pop" it in your computer today! You won't
belive the difference!