Hi I'm fairly new to using maya and I'm trying out the PLE version, but I had a few problems getting it to work.

I started maya on my laptop only to find it crashed during the loading screen.

spec:
Athlon 64 3200
1024mb ram
Radeon 9700 128mb mobility ATI catalyst 5.8
60gb 4200rpm hdd

So I decided to try my desktop which is slightly less powerful only to find that once again it crashed.

spec:
P4 2.8Ghz
512mb ram
Radeon 9000 128mb Catalyst 5.9 (Omega)
250gb 7200 hdd

At the same time my friend had downloaded maya on his machine and it hado worked perfectly

spec.
Athlon 64 3500
1024mb ram
Gefroce 6800gt forceware 77.xx
300gb 7200rpm hdd

The only mayor difference is the graphics card so I decided update the drivers then to install some 3rd party drivers which didn't work also.

I decided to try with no graphics drivers installed and
to my surprise it WORKED.

I couldn't understand this at all. I decided to install some old drivers I had on a disk, these amazingly worked but they are version 4.5 and decrease my performance by about 10% which is not very acceptable.

So I would appreciate it if anyone else has had this problem and how (if) they fixed it with the new drivers, thanks.