Radeon x600 - can't install under XP...

I'm not at all sure this is worth fooling with at all... ancient/tired old x600 pcix vid card with little to offer, but it came with an old HP DC7100, a capable system if spruced up a bit. for whatever reason, the xp pro sp3 I put on it could not install a basic vga driver, or at least not report itself as such. so even though it works and has some basic features, windows reports it as unknown, UNtil I try to point the driver wizard to what should be the right files, and then I get "cannot install" .. i.e. wrong device.
If I run what SHOULD be the legacy driver support package 10.2 from ATI, it barfs saying either the vga driver is not installed or "cannot find inf".
there are a LOT of posts about this floating around and I don't see a clean solution so for the moment have removed it, running the onboard.

win7 installed a driver for it fine.... but the coa for this guy is xp pro so that is what it shall be.

if anyone knows the answer, thank you in advance.

 

Have you tried going to www.ati.com to download the latest drivers?

A long shot might be to install the card, turn on the PC, immediately go into the BIOS and set the PC to use on-board video (not auto-select - just be sure the monitor is connected to the on-board video during this step).

If Device Manager recognizes the card, choose "update driver" and install the latest version you downloaded at ati.com. My experience has been that XP is not that great at finding the latest drivers automatically.

If it takes the update, reboot and switch the BIOS video source back to auto-select.

At best, it will solve the problem. At worst, you will have wasted 10 minutes trying.

Hope this helps.

 

I had already done the easy/obvious before posting. the ATI package is flawed - on one try, it seemed to complete, but when I restarted and checked Device Manager, it showed no driver whatsoever... pretty interesting since it was displaying, just not with the features working [so I assume the teeny gpu was not even in play]. The next time I tried to install, the installer flamed out with message "no inf file found" and suggestion to reinstall the Windows generic VGA driver. i thought that was pretty clever of the programmers to put that sort of check in, but why can't they make their package work? there's nothing missing from Win XP here... its full-bore XP Pro SP3 with all the goodies. onboard works fine, which is a good thing since the ancient radeon is a brick.

I tried to find old driver sets for the card [it did work in the past] but cannot find anywhere. If anyone could help me out there, that will surely be the answer. Apparently ATI's policy is "if they can't find it, they can't mess it up" :-D