ATI sucks - they should outsource to America
I’ve left about 30$ and I decided to replace the GForce2 borrowed video card with an Asus-ATI 9200SE brand new 
one. And here comes the pain.
I had no experience with ATI, but Marius, a friend that used to sell PC hardware, told me that Catalyst is a good replacement for Nvidia’s NView. I checked on ATI’s website and indeed Catalyst was on the "at-a-glance" features of the 9200-based video cards. There are even two links to download it.
Dana drop by the cheap Taurus store and brought the card about an hour ago.
I’ve admired the fact that Windows XP included drivers for it, as in the days when I used SiS 530. This was not the case with the previous card, Nvidia’s GForce2, when Windows XP used to bug me about an unidentifiable video device. (I hope Xboxes, TabletPCs and Media Center PCs using GForces don’t prompt for drivers).
I upgraded? downgraded? drivers with those from CD. I really had no idea what GART drivers do, but they were on the list of drivers, below the standard drivers, so installed them too. The right order was a bit confusing: while the installer featured them down the list, the ATI website tells me that GART driver goes first, even before booting, "before operating your system". Then I understood that those were for onboard video chips. The installer tried to trick me when it wrote something about "onboard chipsets" and it was easy to fall for it, because everyone has the chipset onboard and 9200 is a single chip AFAIK, not a chipset.
Some mandatory restarts and then on to Catalyst. Click on the links for it on the 9200 homepage. Select the software from an Nvidia-like menu and there you go. The instructions on the download page say I must have .NET Framework installed. That’s a bad sign, dude, I bet the proggy is slow as death. But there’s more. The latest Catalyst, 4.12, does not support 9200 chips. This is really not nice.
Download it anyway. Install it. No sign that it hates 9200. But there are evil signs: a DLL failed to register. Restart. Start the magic Catalyst. Ugly manga pics, unintuitive menus. Mandatory sign: "You should upgrade your video card!". But I just did it! Uninstall. First try failed.
Let’s move to the previous versions. Now, that’s crap, because this Catalyst comes packaged with the drivers or on standalone versions. If I have to use it I have to:
- run old bundled drivers, which means buggier drivers
- run newer drivers, possibly incompatible with older Catalysts.
or
Move on to driver archive. No hint whatsoever about supported hardware. Read the boring release notes. Version 4.11 doesn’t like 9200. Anyway don’t click on the links from the summary, they are pointing to 404 non-existing file. Go back. The archive is so long, it scares me that I might spend the evening reading release notes. Move to version 4.10. It supports 9200! That was easy. But what’s that on the title of the browser window? Version 4.9.
What am I going to install? 4.9 or 4.10? Nvidia?