Windows Vista and ATI display drivers

Posted on By Mark Wilson

My IBM T40 is not an old PC. Well, it may be three years old but it’s still a perfectly capable machine. One of its great features is the S-Video display output – perfect for watching films from the computer on a TV – at least it would be if I could get it to work under Windows Vista.

The trouble is that the T40 has an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics chipset. The Windows Vista setup routine had installed the standard VGA graphics adapter driver (v6.0.6000.16386) but there is no supported Windows Vista driver for this chipset. I could rant on about how this lack of device support is a terrible way for ATI to treat customers and how it’s not as if I have any option to upgrade the graphics in a notebook PC but that won’t get me anywhere (and my blood pressure is already high enough). Nor will it sell me another PC, which is what hardware manufacturers really want, rather than developing modern drivers for old products. Instead, I spent far too much time today trying to get it working:

  • I found a forum post that suggested the Windows XP drivers would work (at least on pre-release versions of Vista) so I downloaded the latest available drivers from the IBM website, extracted them to a folder on my hard disk and let Windows Vista look there for updated drivers. After a successful installation (v6.14.10.6547) Windows reported the correct adapter type and provided support for multiple displays. So I was half way to my goal but without ATI-specific device options to enable advanced features (like the S-Video) connection.
  • Next, I tried running the full installer for the XP drivers and all the associated bloat but all I got was a blue screen of death (ati3duag.dll PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA)… not a good result.
  • So I downloaded and installed the latest version (v7.5) of the ATI Catalyst Control Center (CCC) – except that it ignored my graphics adapter completely and just gave me some Catalyst Install Manager (CIM) links for updating/uninstalling CCC. At one stage, I was even dumped back to 4-bit 640×480 graphics and had to roll back my driver to the standard VGA before reinstalling the XP driver that had previously been working in Vista.
  • I tried running individual installers from within the extracted CCC package (e.g. ccc-graphics-full-existing.msi) and something happened to make a desktop right-click option for ATI CATALYST(R) Control Center appear (I hate excessive capitalisation in menu items!) but CCC still doesn’t load, so I guess it doesn’t like the XP display driver.
  • After reading Koroush Ghazi’s ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide, I tried Ray Adams’ ATI Tray Tools but these just produced memory errors on Vista, even when run as Administrator.
  • Finally, I went back to my extracted driver package and ran the ATI Control Panel (v8.133.2.1.1-061116a0949984C) setup (from the CPANEL folder, rather than the top level CIM installer). Even though Vista informed me that “this program has known compatibility issues” and that “ATI Control Panel is incompatible with this version of Windows”, it gave me access to all the advanced display settings but I couldn’t get it to recognise that the TV was connected.

ATI Control Panel

Now it’s the end of the day and I’m giving up. I guess I’ll have to go back to XP to use my TV-out (or watch videos on the laptop display). Grrr.

File name limitations when accessing Windows file shares from a Mac

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Earlier this afternoon, one of my friends got in touch with “a quick tech question” (it had to be quick as his method of communication was SMS text message):

“…We have a brand new, state of the art pre-press system which, for some reason, is running Windows 2000. It seems that this OS cannot handle file names longer than 27 chars…”

I was sure that this would be an integration issue rather than an operating system restriction as I’ve never come across any such limitation with a Windows NT-based Windows system (leaving aside the question as to why would a state of the art device use an old and unsupported operating system?) – besides which, I was in no mood to give an office full of professional Mac users an excuse to bash Microsoft!

After a very short time spent googling, I found a newsgroup post which explains the issue. It seems that Apple filing protocol (AFP) 2.2, used by Windows Services for Macintosh, has a 31-character limit (presumably 4 of those characters are used by the driveletter:\ portion of the filename and another one somewhere else leaving 27 visible characters). AFP 3.x has no such limitation but, as all modern Macs can use SMB to communicate natively with Windows servers, there seems little point in using Services for Macintosh these days. Looking at the Wikipedia article on AFP, there may also be restrictions on file sizes with AFP and certain client-server combinations.

New (mighty) mouse

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few months back, I wrote about the problems I have been experiencing with my Apple Mighty Mouse.

I got used to cleaning the scroll ball, but after a while, the right-click became unreliable – to the point where I had to connect an ordinary PC mouse to the Mac, which then worked perfectly (indicating that my configuration was fine).

Contrary to the anecdotal reports that I linked in my original post, last week I took the not-so-mighty Mouse to the Apple Store in London (Regent Street), where a “genius” exchanged it for a new one.  I hadn’t been hopeful (as when it was my turn for service he was displaying a really unhelpful attitude, still complaining to a colleague about his previous customer) but, even after trying it out on another machine and not finding any problem, he commented that I “seem to know what I’m talking about” (I hope so!) and exchanged it anyway.

I’d forgotten how good it was when it was new – I just hope this one lasts a bit longer.

Working with OpenXML document formats in Office 2003

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Just before I left the office yesterday evening, I downloaded some presentations from Microsoft. Not surprisingly, these were in the new Office 2007 (OpenXML) document format and Windows XP recognised them as zipped archives (which they are – if you open one up, there are a load of XML files and graphics – incidentally a great way to extract graphics from a presentation – although curiously they all have the date and time stamp of 01/01/1980).

As I still use Office 2003 at work, it seemed logical to me that these files would be inaccessible, but I opened one up out of curiosity and PowerPoint gave me the option to install a compatibility pack (presumably I’d already installed an update to provide the “hook” for Office 2003 to download the compatibility pack). Once the 27MB Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office System had been installed, I could work natively with the files, including the ability to save OpenXML from within Office 2003 applications, disproving my earlier predictions of file format nightmares.

Amit Agarwal has more information about working with the OpenXML file formats on his Digital Inspiration blog.