JTexas

Hey DH, I am having a fairly annoying issue with my laptop accepting any drivers that I install.

Laptop Specs:

Emachines M6811
AMD Athlon 64 3400 2.20GHz
1.25G of RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 (64Mb)
Windows XP Home (32bit)
Service Pack 2 (had SP3 but uninstalled it, in an effort to solve my driver issue)

Well, I'll start from the top.

I tried to install the Catalyst 8.9 driver from AMD a week or so ago. This failed and caused my computer to start in VGA mode. I uninstalled the driver and rolled back to the previous version, Catalyst 8.3. This failed as well, the computer continued to start in VGA, giving me the following error upon accessing the "Settings" tab of my Display properties.

** Invalid Display Settings
The Currently Selected Graphics Display Driver Cannot Be Used. It was written for a previous version of Windows, and is no longer compatible with this version of Windows.
The system has been started using the default VGA driver.

Please contact your hardware manufacturer etc etc etc...**

At this point, I used System Restore to restore back to a few days before with my previous settings. This worked and the problem was seemingly solved.

A few days later, after restarting my computer (no updates or anything), the computer started in VGA again, giving me the same error when accessing the "settings" tab of the display properties.

Now, a list of things that I have done in an attempt to remedy this problem.

1) Uninstall and roll back to previous driver (Catalyst 8.3)
2) Restore to the previous date that I restored to as a result of the last problem
3) Omega Drivers both new and archived version (too many to list)
4) Installation of SP3 (then repeated 1-3)
5) Purchase and use of DriverCleaner.NET before each installation that follows
6) Mobility Modder (the latest version) of Catalyst 8.9 all the way back to 8.3
7) Instalation of non-catalyst mobility 9600 drivers from Softpedia
8) Uninstallation of SP3 (repeated step 6/7)

( I have tried all of the above steps in Safe Mode and VGA only mode as well)

Mission Failure...


I am baffled. I truely am clueless as to what is going and what to do. If there are any suggestions or similar problems I would LOVE to hear them. I think you guys are doing a great job here and have wonderful success. I hope that I can be in the 98% success rate and not the 2% failure category.