stupid computer…

So anyway, my computer went all jazzy–in a bad way–about a month ago. At first Firefox and Chrome started eating up tonnes of memory, which caused them to crash. Then sometimes it’d lead to a blue screen, which of course is not good.
I’ve had a similar problem in the past, and I searched all through this diary to find a mention of it–and more importantly what I’d done to fix it–but there was nothing. Zip. Nada.
Anyway, so I boot up a game to play on that, rather than get stressed out with the internet crashing every thirty seconds. And it turns out that my graphics have gone loopy, too. So I update all my drivers, I downgrade Flash Player (because that’s what kept crashing, and it’d just updated), perform every virus/malware scan I can think up and… nothing.
I went on, just coping with the problems (i.e. not playing games, and reloading the internet every time it crashed, and restarting after each BSOD) until I decided it’d gone on long enough.
James, my cousin, remembered that last time I’d had the problems I’d just re-installed Windows and that’d fixed it. So I tried again.
Unfortunately that process involved moving all my documents, videos and music to my external hard drive. Not only did that take forever, I couldn’t actually move everything over – I had to get rid of some stuff. Which was a shame, but unavoidable, so no use moaning about it.
Two days of un/installing stuff later, and many a problem with Windows Update, I was back up to speed as I could get. I booted Chrome, and less than five minutes later, crash. I booted Fallout: New Vegas and two seconds later, crash.
The Chrome issue still stands, but it doesn’t seem to be as bad as it once was. This’ll probably have to wait until Adobe get their butts into gear and release the next update. Thanfully the graphics crash with games is now fixed; it turns out ATI had released a broken driver update, and in trying to fix my initial problem I’d installed it, which caused the second problem.
Took them about a month, and I had to go searching their website for it, but I eventually found a hotfix for the driver issue.

Long story short: I’m here to document how to fix the graphics issue, and to drop in some key words for search purposes.

Computer. Graphics card. Flash player. Adobe. Broken. Bastards at ATI.

Basically, G, someone fucked up, and it wasn’t you. DOWNGRADE the driver for your graphics card, which is a nightmare, since you have to edit the registry and remove all traces of the current drivers you’ve got installed. You might also want to try DOWNGRADING Flash player.

If all else fails, WAIT. Sweeping the HDD clean and reinstalling Windows just causes you a heap of trouble; you’ll lose a lot of stuff you didn’t really want to lose and worse, the problem you were experiencing probably won’t be fixed.

Eventually ATI or Adobe will realise they’ve screwed everyone over and they’ll release a hotfix or a whole new update.