ATI Mobility x700

Hi All,

I have a Sony Vaio BX297XP with an ATI Mobility Radeon x700 graphics card.

I have installed the RC build of Windows 7 as a second OS on the machine.

I am finding it incredibly difficult to solve the display driver issue that I have.

Currently in Device Manager my display adapter is listed as:

Standard VGA Graphics Adapter

I believe that, since this is occuring, any ATI graphics drivers that I try to install aren't recognising the x700 as my graphics card and so are failing to update any drivers.

At the moment I'm stuck with the standard Windows display drivers which limit the resolution of the screen and disable graphics acceleration etc..

If anyone has an idea of how to solve the problem I would appreciate feedback. I wondered whether it would have anything to do with updating chipset drivers etc...but since I've never had to do that before (and since I am still using XP on the laptop) I didn't want to start messing things up.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks/

edit: I should add that, on my first install of Windows 7 I used Windows Update to install an 'ATI Technologies Inc. driver update for ATI MOBILITY RADEON X700' - once installed, after rebooting the screen was completely black and there was nothing I could do to get the picture back. I tried booting in low-resolution mode and safe mode but neither helped. I wondered whether it was because I had the screen set to the highest resolution possible before installing and rebooting the drivers.

It sounds like Windows Update is finding the drivers you need ok, but there is some other problem. I can't understand why you'd get a black screen even when booting in low-res mode.

Just as strange is why Windows 7 won't install the ATI drivers - as it should just remove the standard VGA graphics adapter once it picks up your new drivers.

Perhaps try using the Vista drivers rather than Windows 7 ones from this page (run them in compatibility mode) and see if that works. It looks like the X700 isn't supported in the latest W7 driver release.

Thanks for your message Ian.

Luckily, late last night (and I probably should've done this before), I accessed the recovery partition for the vaio that I'm using. Within that partition was 2 video folders, one containing ATI drivers for the card and the other for graphics acceleration.

I at first tried to install the drivers as normal but no luck, so ran them in compatibility mode (xp SP2) and they installed fine.

On rebooting I then tried to update to the latest Catalyst drivers using the Mobility Modder application. I did this update through the device manager - drivers were installed but incorrectly so I've returned to the previous working drivers.

Just gotta find a way to upgrade now.

I was wondering if you had found a solution to this problem?

I also have a Sony BX297XP and at the moment am only able to use the old XP drivers so don't even have WDDM v1.0

The new Win7 driver also gives me a blank screen.

Thanks

Hi Tude,

Afraid I didn't find a solution to the problem - well, in a roundabout way I did, I sold my Vaio and bought a MacBook Pro.

Never managed to find any better working drivers for W7.

Good luck.

Hi all,

Just to say I get the same black screen too if I allow Windows updates to install the X700 driver so I'm stuck with 1600*1200 as the highest resolution it will go up to.

Did anyone find an answer in the end ?

Thanks
Matt