You should always make sure you follow the directions for installing video drivers, and all drivers and applications you install with those drivers, when you used to have different video installed, or when you are updating your drivers - you probably have to un-install existing drivers - you certainly will have to if there is an entry for display drivers in Add/Remove Programs.
If you didn't unistall your existing drivers first, you will probably have trouble installing any video drivers for any video card. You will tend to have more problems if the old and new video have the same maker's chipsets.
If you are upgrading from onboard video, there are other things you need to know - plugging in some video cards on some mboards does not disable the onboard video and the two will conflict, even if the drivers for the onboard video have been removed. If there is a setting in the bios to turn off the onboard video (there usually isn't) turn it off, or BEFORE you are going to install the video card, Disable the onboard video in Device Manager in Windows, then shut down the computer, install the card, and boot up.
Also - you did't say whether you have a genuine made by ATI Radeon 9200, or a clone with ATI Radeon 9200 chips. If you have a clone, the chips may not be wired to the card as ATI intended, and the card may not be capable of supporting all the features of the ATI made card with the same chips. Look at the web site of the clone maker - if they have drivers, and they don't say they are identical to ATI's drivers, use their drivers, not ATI's, or you may have problems. You can use ATI's web site for troubleshooting, but you can't rely on using ATI's drivers unless you can confirm they are identical.
If you did not unload previous video drivers and all software associated with those drivers before you tried to install your Radeon 9200, or upgrade the drivers for your Radeon 9200, you've probably got a mess on your hands. If the previous video had ATI chips you've got an even bigger mess to deal with.
I've had similar problems dealing with someone else's similar mess this last week, when something went wrong when they tried upgrading the drivers for an ATI brand All In Wonder 9800.
I tried uninstalling all the ATI drivers and associated drivers ans applications, then installing the upgrades, but ran into a lot of problems - the most annoying being:
- a "SEVERE" error - "Zero Display Service" when installing the display drivers,
-and whenever I loaded Multimedia Center 9...., after the next boot the Desktop would only get as far as loading the background (wallpaper), then it would halt. I found I could press Alt-Ctrl-Del to pop up Task Manager, select Applications, New Task and type: (or select, after the first time) explorer.exe, OK to get the Desktop and Windows to load.
I think I have figured out the SEVERE error - you unistall the display drivers in Add/Remove, reboot, but DON'T install drivers while booting - Cancel that (or those - there are two of them in my case) - that leaves Device Manager - Display Adapters set to a vga-like state. Then you can install the display drivers, or all the drivers in the proper order, NOT rebooting when any release notes tell you to before installing the next set.
I haven't figured out the Desktop freeze when Mulimedia Center is installed yet. I'm going to try the manual method of removing all traces of ATI stuff next - see below.
One thing I've found on the web is the ATI uninstall programs often don't uninstall everything properly these days (they used to be quite good). ATI also has the utilities cat-uninstaller.exe (a.k.a. ATI Software Uninstall or similar, if present in Add/Remove, which is supposed to uninstall all ATI entries in Add/Remove in one go, if it's there in Add/Remove), and smartgart-uninstall.exe, but they also may not get rid of all things they should. A few posts even said using DriverCleaner wasn't enough.
There are several places you can look on the ATI site for info. The best one I've found so far is here:
http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894
Select Knowledge Base
on the left choose Solve a Problem - Installation
The first part - web pages - tell you how to uninstall the software AND how to manually get rid of all important traces of the ATI software and Registry entries that may be interfering with the install of the newer drivers so you can start again from scratch. The Printable directions after that - pdf files - do not include that manually removing part.
Once you clean your Windows of what ATI stuff may be intefering with your software install:
- if you have a clone card, use the drivers on the clones card's web site unless they say or you can confirn they are identical to ATI's.
- make sure you have downloaded the right drivers and applications
- most current ATI drivers and applicatins require you have installed DirectX 9.0c and Microsoft .NET Framework 2....
- read the install directions - look at all release notes - there is a specific order you should be installing sets of drivers, and there is sometimes important t-shooting info, if you have problems, in the release notes (especially for Multimedia Center)
- good luck!
