Can you help me update my video driver?

August 17, 2006 7:34 PM

I can't get my ATI Radeon video driver update to install... can anyone help?

I have a Compaq Presario X1000 with a Radeon 9200 video driver. In order to play the new game I bought (first one in years!) The game company's tech service line says I need to update my video driver. I'm running WinXP Professional.

When I try to run the game software, it goes through the first few screens and then shuts down every time.

I've downloaded and tried to install the software on this site
http://tinyurl.com/qah7t

But when I run the installation for the second piece of software (going in order), it says no driver is present and installation cannot continue. When I run dxdiag, it still says that my display software is from 2004. The new version is 2006.

I've spent hours on this... can anyone help?

posted by kdern to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Laptop video cards often need drivers from the manufacturer, not the video card company. Try searching for your laptop here and see if you can find a new driver there.
posted by scodger at 8:36 PM on August 17, 2006

If you're trying to just update the driver try doing it from the device manager, find the radeon then update it and point it specifically to the folder with the new files in it if there is one (if it's just a setup program might be in your temp foler). I've had luck sometimes specifcally pointing to the .inf file for the new driver.
posted by psychobum at 8:41 PM on August 17, 2006

You could try the higly-experimental-and-possibly-illegal-but-seemed-to-be-the-only-thing-that-would-install-on-my-MacBook-Pro Omega Drivers?
posted by public at 4:40 AM on August 18, 2006

The video driver from the Compaq site is from 2003. I tried an Omega driver and I lost my native widescreen resolution.
posted by kdern at 6:16 AM on August 18, 2006

UPDATE: I have tried everything with no success. If someone can help me further it would be very much appreciated. Please post here or e-mail me (e-mail in profile).

I've downloaded the latest update from the Compaq site, but it does not seem to be installing correctly.
posted by kdern at 7:03 AM on August 18, 2006

I updated a Radeon 9200 for a friend last week. The 9200 is an unsupported card for the Catalyst 6.7 driver, but you can download the Catalyst 6.5 driver and it should work. My friend was running Half-life 2:Episode 1 with it and made his out of date driver message disappear.
posted by Roger Dodger at 7:50 AM on August 18, 2006

scodger is right that you need to download the drivers from the manufacturer's web site, not the ATI site.

IMHO I find that unless you are having problems it is usually better to use a driver you know is stable and works with your system. IOW you may want to try the game with your current drivers and only upgrade if you encounter problems running the game. If it ain't broke, don't fix (update) it.

If you decide to update, the first thing to do is to uninstall your current driver. Go to Add/Remove Programs in the control panel and remove it there. It will probably prompt you to reboot. It should boot up with a standard default video driver. Then install the driver you downloaded from the HP site.
posted by banshee at 8:21 AM on August 18, 2006