[DrX]

Hi ya all. I just wanted to inform you guys that i found a way to fix the problem with my mobility radeon and video playback. I've been fighting with this issue since I installed Sid Meier's Pirates! on my laptop and wasn't able to play it with my old drivers. I have a bit over a year old HP Pavilion with a Mobility Radeon IGP 320.

I first tried Omega drivers, which made the game work, but crashed the ability to play any kind of video on any player that I have (WMP, WMPClassic, DivXPlayer, PowerDVD). Since the drivers didn't operate properly I decided to go for the latest ATI drivers offered by HP. They were from April 2004. Now the video playback worked, but several games couldn't initialize DirectX, and from DxDiag I noticed that the driver for some reason didn't recognise Direct3d or DirectDraw at all.

After this a decided to try Catalyst 4.12 with the Mobility Modder, but again the video problem came up, although everything else worked well. Next I installed XP SP2 and all the related updates. Still the video didn't work.

Then I found an ATI update (ATI Technologies, Inc -Video -RADEON IGP 320M) from May 2004 on my Windows Update pages and installed it just to give it a shot. And BOOM, after installing this update everything including the games have worked. I know that by installing that particular update I may have sacrificed some of the performance power on games, but for me laptop is a lot more than a gaming device and I want it to be suitable for several purposes.

Now I'm satisfied with my graphics setup and I hope that this might help someone with similar problems!