For people who has Acer, Asus, Dell, Toshiba laptops and it is using ATI Mobility RADEON graphics card, sorry to tell you that you can’t install the official ATI Mobility RADEON drivers. If you download the latest ATI Mobility RADEON drivers from ATI and try to install it on your laptop, you’ll get the error message “Thank you for your interest in CATALYST. Unfortunately, this software update cannot be installed on your system. Please contact your notebook manufacturer for driver updates.”
Official ATI website mentioned that only Alienware, Arima, Clevo, ECS, Eurocom, Falcon Northwest, FIC, Fujitsu Siemens, HyperSonic PC, Mitac, MSI, NEC-CI, Pro-Star, RockDirect, Sager and Uniwill can use their driver. Is downloading ATI drivers from the laptop manufacturer’s website the only way? No I don’t think so…
Few days ago I wanted to reformat my hard drive to install a fresh copy of Windows XP on my Acer laptop using (Windows XP Professional Retail SP2 Integrated December 2007 ETH0) CD. After installation, I downloaded the ATI drivers and I wasn’t able to install it! This time I got a different error “Setup was unable to find components that can be installed on your current hardware or software configuration. Please make sure you have the required hardware or software.”
I neither can’t install the official ATI driver nor the manufacturer’s ATI driver. At first I thought my graphics card on my laptop is faulty but I found out that the problem is on Windows XP Professional Retail SP2 Integrated December 2007 ETH0 CD. It uses RyanVM’s Update Pack and somehow it made my Windows unable to detect my graphics card.
After a little searching, I found third party modified ATI and NVIDIA drivers from Omega Drivers. The purpose of the Omega Drivers is to provide gamers with an alternate set of drivers, ones that have more options and features than the original sets. The drivers contain optimizations, extra features (like OC capabilities), more resolutions and internal tweaks that can give them the edge in a gaming environment over the normal drivers, which are often tailored for synthetic benchmarks. All Omega driver sets are tested (unless noted) by the maker in his own PC or in an alternate PC (in the case of the Nvidia drivers) to ensure maximum compatibility and reliability.
If your laptop is unable to install either official or manufacturer drivers, then use Omega Drivers.
Another advantage of using Omega Drivers is you’ll get the latest driver. Newer drivers equals more functions, bug fixes and better performance. I checked Acer’s ATI Mobility RADEON drivers and the drivers are really outdated if compared with the latest version from official ATI website.
As you can see, Acer is still using ATI display driver version 8.073 while in official ATI website is already 8.1! The ATI driver files from Acer also dated back to year 2004 which is nearly 4 years ago! Which would graphics driver you use? Manufacturer’s or Omega Drivers? I definitely would go for Omega Drivers if I can’t install the latest official ATI or NVIDIA drivers…