Frustrated by my unfruitful research to solve my video problem, I finally emailed ATI (now AMD) support to see if I could get more information on driver plans. It took me 10 minutes of filtering through ATI’s site to find where I could just email support, I was forced to sift through knowledge base after knowledge base to see if my answer was in there before submitting a support request. Finally able to do so, I got a disappointing automated response:
“AMD Customer Care for ATI products does not provide direct technical support for laptops/notebooks at this current time (telephone or email). If you require direct technical support please contact the system manufacturer of your laptop/notebook.”
Followed by:
“AMD strives to continually improve our drivers and software and we thank you for taking the time to submit your feedback. The feedback you provided will be forwarded to our development team for review.”
Yeah, that’s quality support. Meanwhile, testing some apps in Vista yesterday nearly made me sick due to the jacked up video settings. Moving on, I attempted to contact Toshiba as instructed by above useless support message. As expected, got nowhere, Toshiba will not guarantee or support any laptop that does not have a Vista compatible sticker and they have no Vista drivers available for my laptop. Frustrated, I tried one more thing, a big gamble considering what happened with my last XP driver install, but this one worked and here’s what I did:
1. Download Toshiba’s Windows XP driver ATI Mobility driver, click to download.
2. Ran the self-extracting exe in Windows Vista, which launches the ATI installer then blows up with an unsupported hardware error.
3. Then go to the display properties in Vista and manually update the driver, selecting the “Have Disk” option and pointing to the driver sub folder of the newly extracted ATI directory (like C:\driver.temp) and selecting to first file listing.
4. Next the driver wizard will confirm which card you’re installing by showing 2 listings for ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP, select the first one and proceed.
The driver installation should take Vista about 3 minutes then you’ll be prompted to reboot. On restart, the video settings should look much better and the display properties should show an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP for display adapter.
This is not a perfect solution, some programs leave desktop remnants and some of the desktop gadgets have an ugly purple frame around them. Aero and some of the built-in screen savers will not work. But it’s much better than the distorted default and I don’t feel like I’m going to hurl after working in Vista for 30 minutes.
28/10/2008 at 8:37 pm Permalink
Good post.
21/02/2009 at 10:28 am Permalink
Installation wors fine, but when I started a dvd playback computer freezed totally, so I had to decrease hardware acceleration more then half. As a result high definition files move erratically and I have to switch hardware accelerator on and off for movies and the rest of applications. I installed Windows7 and it is the same problem. I do not have any problem on my desktop with nVideo card.
Looks like Toshiba and ATI want to push you to buy new computer for next operation system.
30/03/2009 at 7:30 am Permalink
Hi, Name’s Josh and I was just going around circles trying to figure out the vista drivers for my friend’s Compaq Presario 2500 but all in vain! Thanks to your website, we solved the problem in windows 7 beta…thanks a ton!
28/07/2009 at 6:49 am Permalink
Great post! exactly wich version of the driver is tho one you are postin? i am trying to update my driver and i wold like to know which it is before executing it.
16/09/2009 at 10:24 am Permalink
IT WORKED IT WORKED!!!!! For Vista. A bit tricky, I had to watch my selection during the “I have my own drivers” phase, but a quick reboot, go into advanced display setting and bam! THANKS A MILLION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That was VISTA. I’ll report back if Windows 7 works.