Hi guys, I am desperately trying to make my old machine with Ati radeon 9550 work with win7. The default driver that windows installs as well as the 9.11 catalyst both give me instability and GPU recovery whenever anything stresses the card....even simple video playback. I originally thought the card was faulty, but I installed winXP on the machine and it sorked perfectly, I tested it with 3dmark03 and no problems. I don't care about performance, I just need a driver that works stably! I am going to give this PC to my Aunt and it needs to be able to playback videos etc bothing fancy like 3d games and hte like...so if you can suggest any old vista driver that works well, let me know...
thanks a lot! I downloaded the 6.2 drivers that supposedly are the best for 9550, at the time there was no Vista so they are XP and when I forced-installed them I had a BSOD on reboot. Back to standard display adapter, and then installed the oldest Vista driver available (8.2). no BSOD, but the result was the same as the latest 9.11. I'll try the 8.7 now, but I think there is no hope....keeping my fingers crossed it might work, but not very confident about it. This is an old PC and I am giving it away to my Aunt jsut to have something to "play" with and learn windows-internet and stuff. I built it off spare parts and paying for a new AGP would be suicide. The 100$ 3850 you say, although an excellent card, is double what the whole system costs I'll try the 8.7 and report later...
Ooo yes. You can technically use Vista drivers as a last resort, but using XP video drivers will fail in a pretty blue way. Different display model and all that. Again, just what I read, apparently they tried a few of the 8 series, 8.7 was the magic number for them. The others had stability issues. Note you may have to manually install the driver. Just locate the driver folder (Somewhere under C:\ATI by default if I recall.) Ahh yea, that wouldn't be a good deal heh. I picked this one up specifically for my husband's gaming rig, and it worked out really well. But for a basic workstation, yea that's too much. (NewEgg and the like has some cheapie nVidia's under $30.. no idea on 7 compatibility though, research first.) Of course, if it's just a basic internet/office type of workstation and Windows compatibility isn't a major issue, a good Gnome or KDE installation would be a viable option too. I prefer Arch myself, but I've toyed with Ubuntu for example, stupidly easy to set up and maintain nowadays, and runs on anything. Lemme know how it works out, if it works for you may have to put that junker system with the X850 back together.
8.7 didnt work either...but I read the thread you ponted to, and the guy suggesting to use them has a radeon 9600xt, which is almost the same card as my 9550 (just different clocks), so I am curious if I am doing something wrong...maybe the old drivers are not 100% removed or something.... About the installation, with all vista packages (8.2 , 8.7) I didnt have to do anything manually, the installation finished without problems, but I stil get the corrupted logon screen they say in that thread, and as soon as I play a video all is screwed. I dont know what else to try....maybe I'll have to move back to winXP, but its too bad because I'd prefer to give her a win7 PC since she is going to learn windows from scratch.....will be a same to learn on an old OS.
What chipset is the motherboard? if its a VIA chipset i don't think you will have much luck via-ati-agp8 is a match made in hell especially for vista/windows 7 !!! I ended up disabling the AGP and setting it to a PCI worked OK but obviously no good for anything extensive
I've heard that as well but haven't experienced it. My husbands rig, the one with that AGP HD3850, it's an ASRock 4CoreDual motherboard, with a Via PT880 Ultra chipset. It's been running very well under Windows 7.. really not seeing any differences from my PCI-E rig. Oddly enough, the only time I've had issues with it was his old card, it was an nVidia 7800GS OC. Ran XP and Vista just fine, but 7's display would constantly be corrupted with anything remotely current driver wise, what I suspect the OP is experiencing with his ATI. Had to use a reeeealy old Vista driver, but that was for nVidia. As a test my old X850 works on his properly too with no corruption, but we shelved it because it doesn't support SM3. (That and it's slow as hell for anything remotely current... works nice with KDE's KWin on a Linux server now.) That aside, no shame in using XP if the hardware just won't take it. Some visuals aside, it's really not that much different to the end user, and hey it's still supported till 2014 I think it is.. not going anywhere any time soon.