Graphics card driver problem

First of all, forgive me for any incorrect punctuation marks, I still haven managed to set my keyboard to normal.

So recently, my computer decided to freak out and stop working properly. I re-installed the same Windows XP SP3 on it and everything seemed fine. But.

I cannot get my graphics card drivers to work properly. I have an ATI Radeon, I don remember the model [and I\m unable to open the side panel to check]. I tried running GPU-Z and SiSoftware Sandra to check, but they didn seem to be able to find any actual graphics card on my computer.

First thing I did was of course install the Catalyst Control Center pack with drivers that I had on my computer pre- freak out. It doesn seem to be working, I don get the CCC icon on the system tray. I\ve also updated .NET and DirectX.

The computer works fine otherwise, even plays video almost normally, but when scrolling down a page it doesn do it smoothly, it looks like it\s refreshing every screen individually and very slowly [this is what happened when I last installed the same version of Windows, but installing the Catalyst-drivers took care of it]. Also, games won install.

I\ve tried everything I can think of and am now throwing my humble self at your mercy :frowning:

Download Speccy to learn everything about your hardware including display adapter specifications. Then post the model number, and we can take it from there.

Here\s what Speccy found.


That is odd. Does your display adapter appear in the Device Manager?

Device Manager doesn have anything called Display devices, but under Other devices, it says Video controller [VGA compatible] and has a yellow question mark next to it.

Then your driver did not install correctly, and the card is running of the default Windows driver. Right click on the Video Controller in Device Manager, and install the driver again. If it still won’t install, you are going to have to identify the card manually by removing the card from the computer, and download the correct driver. The one you have maybe incorrect, or it may be corrupted. Or there is something wrong with the card itself, though if it is running on the Windows driver, that is less likely.

Your adapter is probably old enough that drivers for it have moved to the “Legacy” section of the ATI/AMD web site. There are 2 sets of legacy drivers, version 10.2 for “not too obsolete” cards, and version 6.11 for “very obsolete” cards. You’ll probably need one of those for your card.

You may be able to find out which card you have without opening the computer. Go to Start / Settings / Control Panel / System / Device Manager, right-click on the “Video controller [VGA compatible]” item, click Properties, select the Details tab, and then select “Hardware Ids” from the drop-down. You should see something like “PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_68BE&SUBSYS_200A1787&REV_00”. Post what you get here and someone can tell you which card you have.

Here\s the result.

PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_796E&SUBSYS_01551025&REV_00\4&320533A7&0&2808

It works! Thank all heavens and hells!

I searched the ATI site for Legacy and installed some pack there. I can believe I didn stumble upon that before.

Thanks to you all, you\ve saved my day, week, month and year.

Now, how do I set this keyboard straight? It\s using an American layout and I\m in Finland. Someone said it should work from pressing Alt+Shift but that does absolutely nothing.

Go to Control Panel, look for language settings, then add Finnish as a language. You can then pick a keyboard for the language. (You can also add keyboards for existing languages.) There’s a Language Bar that appears on screen where you can choose which language you’re using; if a language has more than one keyboard enabled, you can select the keyboard as well.

I just did this for someone else. Enabled the Canadian Multilingual keyboard for typing in French.

Thanks! Everything’s working splendidly again. Well, I’m off to install some games :smiley:

For reference (since you’ve already solved this), you have a Radeon 2100, re-branded by Acer.