Vista driver for ATi Mobility Radeon 7500

I've been getting to grips with Vista lately and one thing that can be rather annoying is how so many manufacturers are not bringing out updated drivers for their hardware products. This is really not Microsoft's fault but it certainly dampen the "Wow" factor.

A case in point: I recently upgraded a pretty decent laptop (1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM) from XP Pro to Vista Business. Most devices were, to Microsoft's credit, picked up almost straight away. However, the (still very serviceable) ATi Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics chipset would only come up as a "Standard VGA" device. Not a delightful situation. A quick check on AMD/ATi's website revealed that there was no Vista driver for this products (nor for many other decent products either).

Having Googled away for a while I eventually stumbled upon a fix at the following forum:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=2&SiteID=17&PostID=1563655

What you need to do is install the built-into-Vista Mobility Radeon 9000 driver (similar GPU just more RAM) and all is well. This is how you do it:

Windows Button
Control Panel
System and Maintenance
System
Device Manager (under Tasks)
Expand Display Drivers
Right click the Standard VGA adapter
Choose Update Driver Software
Browse my computer
Let me pick from....
Uncheck show compatible
Then browse and find the ati mobility radeon 9000
Acknowledge all messages
Restart the computer when prompted

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