Let's do a couple more things before we go ahead with the new driver. We need to do a thorough checkup of the hard drive and maybe the memory. Since it didn't find anything nasty, we really need to know what messed up that display driver before we go fixing it.
First, open up your "My Computer" and right-click your C: drive (probably called local disk). Click Properties and then the Tools tab. The top selection should be "Error Checking". Click "Check Now" and select both check boxes. It will likely require you to do a restart and run the test before windows loads. This is going to be another long process but if it checks out, it'll let us know that the hard drive is fine.
Second, we need to test that memory. Go here:
MemTest Download - Softpedia and download Memtest. It's a great little program that doesn't even require an installation to run. Just run the Memtest.exe and tell it to "test all available memory". Let it run until it has at least 100% coverage. It'll may take a while especially if you have lots of Ram but it will rule out the memory as the culprit for us.
If both of these run without giving you any error messages, then go ahead and install that ATI driver. If it crashes on reboot, I'd bet the GPU has some issues and might need replacing. Of all the componants in all the machines I've built/serviced over the years, the graphics card seems to be the most frequent to fail unfortunately.
Sorry for all the steps here.
I find the whole "fix it once, fix it right" mentality can really save some headaches when dealing with computers.
