Hi all,
I have successfully installed Catalyst 3.4/3.6 Windows drivers on my laptop M7 ATI graphic card enabled.
With the help of "Cobra" on a board, I have managed to modifiy regular ATI Catalyst 3.4/3.6 drivers to be abble to use them on my laptop.
As you may know, ATI doesn't provide drivers for most of laptops using their mobility graphic cards family. The reason why is The features, capabilities and specifications of an ATI graphics system implemented on a motherboard can be different from the advertised features of an ATI add-in board. Due to the "custom" nature of these motherboard implementations, ATI Technical Support has only a limited ability to assist Customers who have these products. In most cases, we can offer general tips, or direct you to the generic "retail" drivers on our website.
My laptop is a cheap but full powered Gericom Sylver Seraph XL (Intel P4M 2.4Ghz, 250Mo, ATI M7 (Radeon 7500 Mobility) 32Mo, and so on) but it lacks on recent drivers. The only ones I could get are the one from the support CD-ROM provided with the laptop. Any tries to install Catalyst drivers (witch support Radeon 7500 familly) have ended with a "Error: no driver found in INF file". The fact is not that Catalyst drivers aren't support mobility products, they are just ignoring them in the device sugnature check so drivers are thinking you don't have an ATI graphic card in your laptop !
I have found a post from Cobra who has successfully installed Catalyst 3.0 drivers with his M6 ATI powered computer. As far as I could understand, the trick wasn't difficult to apply to other earlier Catalyst version. The only thing I did was to add missing devices signatures in the INF file. Please also note that my modified version contains all Catalyst 3.4/3.6 officialy supported devices, and the one I have added (U1, M6, M7, R200). Cobra has removed all regular cards in his modified INF file ... ;-)
In order to try to install Catalyst 3.4/3.6 drivers on your ATI compatible & Windows XP or 2000 laptop, you have to:
Follow those steeps to install your new Catalyst driver!
InstallDir")
InstallDir\2KXP_INF
InstallDir\2KXP_INF directory to find the right driver (don't use other choices in the wizard).
2003-08-18 Hi Kzar, I came across your "trick" while searching for new drivers for my ATI Radeon 7500 on an ASUS laptop, since ASUS isn't updating the drivers at all. The trick works even with the very latest ATI Catalyst drivers, I just renamed the modified INF you provide with the same name of the INF in the driver package. By the way, if you "extract" the catalyst installation file (.EXE) with Winzip, you can avoid the catalyst installation and skip directly to the manual driver update. I'm using the Catalyst 3.6 release right now, and everything seems fine! Thanks, Giulio V. 2003-15-08 Hey man... I installed according to your directions for the ATI radeon 7500.....because I had problems getting the facial features to work on Star Wars Galaxies...... it did the trick... YOU ARE THE FUCKING MAN!! tks B (from VA..us navy) 2003-18-09 Thanks! Your trick also works on a Compaq EVO N800c! It was a life saver! [...] the only internet connection I could get had port 21 blocked and Compaq on servers their files via FTP so no downloading. I was able to download the catalyst from ATI! Thanks!!!!!!! Dennis C.