Clean install on SSD, game freezes or hangs on zone

[Droog007]

I have this fairly decent home-built gaming PC. Its only weak point is an old 80G HDD. For quite a while, I got around this limitation by running EQ from a RAMDrive. Worked beautifully - zoned fast, very stable... but I wanted more space, and I knew that my old spinner had one platter in the grave, so I bought a Samsung 840 pro series SSD and performed a clean install.

Before starting, I first downloaded drivers: chipset, USB3, video, audio, ethernet.. think that's about it.

Installed Win7 Ultimate (fully legit), installed my drivers, updated everything - went very smooth. Windows boots up very fast and runs like a dream.

However, EQ now runs like crap. Fairly often, the game just locks up and never recovers. More often, I try to zone and it just hangs or I eventually fall back to character/server select. What worse, is that even when I know it's locked and I'll need to restart the game - it can be very difficult to kill off the application/process. I downloaded Process Hacker and run it in administrator mode to alleviate some of the pain, but it can still be obstinate at times. Prior to that, I got a lot of "process tree could not be completely terminated" and "access denied" type errors.

So... I'm guessing that maybe I've got a different driver or something that is not playing well.

Today, I set about trying to compare driver versions between the two installs. This is when I got confused and realized I might need some education.

On the old install (crusty HDD but EQ runs good), I have no drivers listed in "Programs and Features", but I do have these three entries in the Belarc report:

• AMD External Events Version 6.14.11.1120
• ASUS Com Service
• ASUS HM Com Service
• ASUS System Control Service

On the new install (slick new SSD but EQ runs terrible), most/all of the drivers I installed show up in "Programs and Features", and the following relevant entries appear in the Belarc report:

• AMD - External Events Version 6.14.11.1159 (64-bit)
• ATI Technologies - Catalyst Control Center Version 4.5.0.0
• Realtek Semiconductor - HD Audio Manager Version 1, 0, 0, 577 (64-bit)

So - I'm a little baffled... I'm not sure what causes similar drivers for identical hardware to show up differently in Windows. Maybe the original machine is just using whatever it got from Windows update, and being installed in this way does not create such an entry? Unless I get some good advice on this thread pretty soon, I think I'll start uninstalling stuff from the newer setup (sound driver, for example), and see if anything changes.

Failing that, I'm going to assume that something magical happened on that old 80G HDD... I will just CloneZilla it over to the new SSD, call it a day, and try to never change anything.

Also, does anyone know a good tool to compare drivers on two different installs? Not excited about digging through device manager and jotting stuff down.