Trouble installing new ATI drivers in Win7

Forar

I finally got Starcraft 2, and when I went to fire it up the other day, the installation warned me that I was using out of date drivers. And I was! They hadn't been updated since I got the system in March.

So I dutifully went to the ati site, snagged the 10.8 drivers (released August 24th), went into my control panel and clicked on the Catalyst Control Center icon under Remove Programs. I told it to remove all ATI related software, and rebooted.

So far, so good.

However, when I tried to load the new ATI drivers, it got part way into the process and then the system crashed. Uh oh.

When I inspected the program list, the CCC was back, but no icon for it was showing up in my bar, and trying to access it gave me an error that I didn't have the right software for my hardware.

Thus about 2 hours of dicking around with drivers has led me to you fine folks.

I'm running Win7 64 bit on an i7 920 CPU. I've got a Radeon HD 5800 graphics card, and have been trying to use the 10.8 release from ATI's own site without success. The closest I come to getting things right is seemingly managing to remove the old CCC from a partial install, fire up the installer and have windows shit itself to a blue screen, telling me that there was an error and it was trying to protect my system.

Anyway, I really don't want to reinstall windows. Is there any way I can undo any damage I might've inadvertantly caused, and more importantly, get new (or at least newer) video card drivers installed without wasting an entire evening?

I like to think I'm reasonably competant with computers, but I am new to Win 7 (at least compared to XP, which I used for ages) in case that changes anything.

Help H&A!

Nova_C

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=279702

There's a problem with the C++ redistributable. The above isn't where I fixed my installation, but the link I followed I can't find anymore. Anyway, the above may help. If not, google fixes for catalyst installation crashes, etc.

Also, the 10.8 drivers don't always work. Borderlands crashed like crazy for me until I rolled back to 10.5. Plants Vs. Zombies also stopped working with 10.8, works fine with 10.5.

Forar

Thanks for the heads up.

I struggled a bit further before I got frustrated enough to just use a windows restore point. Luckily I had one from a few weeks ago, so I guess it's a moot issue for now, but I wouldn't say it's fully resolved, as I'd like to update my drivers still.

You gave me a good starting point for some reading material, and if anyone else has any hints, tips or suggestions for updating to the latest ATI drivers without my computer soiling itself, I'd greatly appreciate to hear them.

Hirocon

I had a horrible time recently trying to upgrade my ATI drivers. First I ran into the problem with the C++ redistributable. I eventually fixed that problem using a hotfix from Microsoft (details can be found here), but by that time I had already messed with a bunch of registries and I couldn't get Catalyst Control Center to install.

What finally solved the problem for me was, in addition to using the Microsoft hotfix, I had to go to C:\ATI\Support\[driver version]\Config\InstallManager.cfg, and change the last line of text from "=false" to "=true". Then I ran the install manager and it worked fine.

I ended up reverting back to the 10.5 drivers anyway because the newer drivers mess up hardware support for PopCap games.

Sir Carcass

I always install the new drivers over the old ones and haven't had any problems yet.

General_Win

I've always reinstalled the new over the old but recently I've been having a bitch of a time to get the setup to even initialize. You could try installing your drivers from the command line by following these instructions.

How to install ATI drivers from the command line.