It’s installed on my laptop, but is flagged as one of the things causing slow start up. What does it do and would I miss it if I un-installed it?
Any helpful comments appreciated! 😀

It’s settings and stuff for your graphics card.

If you right click on the Desktop, go to Properties then you should see something in there for starting it.

Who/what flagged it as a reason things are running slow?

In my experience, excluding viruses etc, the main reason things run slow is that folk don’t gave enough memory installed. If you have less than 2GB then stick some more in!

Thing is, the drivers shouldn’t need catalyst in order to run – they should just potter along in the background doing their thing; it should only be any ‘advanced’ settings that do require Catalyst.
However, I’ve not worked out how to turn it off myself 🙁

Basically it’ll be talking about the tray icon; there will be a little red ATi square icon in the system tray next to the clock.

You don’t need it and can safely get rid of it for all practical purposes. It’s not going to make any noticable difference to your system performance either way though. I too would be interested to know what flagged it up as a problem.

If you’re comfortable editing the registry I can talk you through removing it. Alternatively, tools like HijackThis will let you disable items using a nice pretty interface. If you want to try it out first, you can disable items temporarily using ‘selective startup in msconfig (start / run / msconfig) which is built in to Windows.

(They used to have an option to disable it built in, right-click / preferences, however I don’t remember seeing this in recent versions)

Really though, I’d be questioning whether this is the correct course of action at all and where you’re getting this info from, as it sounds like the sort of behaviour from applications which like to throw red exclamation marks all over the place in order to show you how vital their application is.