Iffy Boot Camp 3.0 ATI Drivers? Try Windows Update Instead

[Kelmon]

This isn't so much of a question as I think I'm OK now but I'm not convinced that the drivers that Apple provides, even if they come from the hardware manufacturers, are as good as they could be. The reason why I say this is that, prior to installing Snow Leopard and Boot Camp 3.0, I had been playing Dawn of War 2 on an ageing MacBook Pro with an ATI X1600 chipset under Windows 7. What I found odd was that after I had reinstalled Windows 7 and used the Snow Leopard DVD to install the Boot Camp 3.0 drivers was that Dawn Of War started to complain that my display drivers were incompatible with the game. Figuring that I hadn't had this problem before I uninstalled the display drivers Apple provided (from ATI) via the Device Manager, restarted Windows and let Windows Update find drivers instead (again, from ATI). This seems to have sorted out the problem.

If you are having problems with drivers then perhaps letting Windows Update try to find them may be the answer as this seems to have worked in my case.

 

[Infrared]

This isn't so much of a question as I think I'm OK now but I'm not convinced that the drivers that Apple provides, even if they come from the hardware manufacturers, are as good as they could be. The reason why I say this is that, prior to installing Snow Leopard and Boot Camp 3.0, I had been playing Dawn of War 2 on an ageing MacBook Pro with an ATI X1600 chipset under Windows 7. What I found odd was that after I had reinstalled Windows 7 and used the Snow Leopard DVD to install the Boot Camp 3.0 drivers was that Dawn Of War started to complain that my display drivers were incompatible with the game. Figuring that I hadn't had this problem before I uninstalled the display drivers Apple provided (from ATI) via the Device Manager, restarted Windows and let Windows Update find drivers instead (again, from ATI). This seems to have sorted out the problem.

If you are having problems with drivers then perhaps letting Windows Update try to find them may be the answer as this seems to have worked in my case.

Good suggestion!

There is also the option of rolling back drivers, e.g., 3rd button here:



And Windows 7 has the nice capability, in some instances at least, of
swapping graphics card drivers without needing a reboot.

 

[Kelmon]

I'm not sure I would have had the opportunity of the rollback option since I seem to recall loading the Boot Camp 3.0 drivers as soon as possible before running Windows Update. However, that's certainly a good suggestion and something that I'll bear in mind in the future should I encounter a driver foul-up.

In my case, uninstalling the video driver did cause things to go quite strange before the reboot. I ended up with a very small "screen" displayed in the middle of my laptop display. After the reboot the display returned to a full size but at a very low resolution using a generic VGA driver and it needed another restart to install the ATI drivers that Windows Update downloaded.