drivers for Tadeon 8500 DV Hercules 3D Prophet card

[p jayant]

I know this is an old vintage card but I have to use it until my budget
permits me to buy a new one. It has worked fine in the past with
Catalyst 3.1 and 4.2 set of drivers. But suddenly XP has started saying
ATI Control Panel could not be initiated and declaring the Display
Adapter unacceptable. So I have to go to Safe mode and remove the the
Display driver and use a VGA Controllerdriver, probably of ATI provided
on the installation disk. When the system is re-started, the message
about the ATI Control Panel mentioned above pops up. No need to mention
that the video capture driver in the Catalyst set does not get
installed and so the entire range of video applications is kaput.If I
try to install a later version of drivers, XP says it cannot find any
WDM compatible hardware on the system. Now What does that mean? Is it
saying that the ATI Radeon 8500 card is not WDM compatible?
I also find that the ATI's special Uninstaller is not successful in
removing the MMC and it keeps showing up in the list of Add/Remove
programs without any indication of its size in the second column.Nor
can Add?remove operation remove it.
Is it possible to revive the Card by downloading the correct drivers
and if yes from where? The ATI web-site caters only to the yuppies of
ATI and the list of old drivers does not say which driver set will work
for a the AIW Radeon 8500 DV (without the Remote of the yuppies) Card.
So, please don't just hoodwink me asking me to go to the ATI web-site
and say, it has older drivers too.
I hope some soulmate who has gone throgh similar travails of ATI's user
friendly service will give meaningful help and enable me to re-start
functioning of the Card.

P. Jayant

 

[Andy H]

Have you tried drivercleaner pro to uninstall all the leftovers?

www.drivercleaner.net

 

[p jayant]

Have you tried drivercleaner pro to uninstall all the leftovers?

www.drivercleaner.net

Thanks for the info but the site does not provide any information on
how to order or download the software. I hope it can really clean up
the junk I must have on my computer with all the wild attempts I have
had to make to survive the impact of inadequately explained updates ATI
and MS keep making to their software (with warnings of dire
consequences for those who do not implement them) and the surprise
interactions of the two which the user has to face.

P. Jayant

 

[Andy H]

Um there's a free version - Drivercleaner pro, pretty easy to find too -
click on the drivercleaner pro picture or link on the left of the page, then
scroll down to the bottom of the page, click on either the download or
download mirror icons.

 

[p jayant]

I got it and have downloaded the software. Let me study the Readme file
and see if after removing all the junk, I can re-install any version of
the Catalyst. If that fails, I am going to look at alternative video
cards. Do you or any other correspondent of this Newsgroup have any
experience of using the Pinnacle's PCTV Deluxe Tuner & Video Capture
Card? Does Pinnacle provide better service than ATI? If the user
ecperience is good, I am inclined to change to Pinnacle's card
mentioned above.

P. Jayant

 

[Andy H]

The pinnacle card isn't a graphics card. It's a vidcap/tv card.

 

[p jayant]

The pinnacle card isn't a graphics card. It's a vidcap/tv card.

Thanks for your help. I have succeeded in removing all the drivers of
ATI from my sytem. For re-installation, I still have bundles of
Catalyst 3.0, 3.1 and 4.2 on my system but when I tried to install
them, I get funny messages from XP. First it offfers to get the
required Display driver from Internet sources and asks me to put the
Installtion CD in the Drive. On doing that, it says certain drivers
like ati2mtag.sys, ati2erec.dll, atinmdxx, atinesxx are not on the
disc; so I should tell XP from where to get them. Earlier some of them
were in Windows/Sys folder and I could point to that; now that they are
all removed, some were available in the Catalyst bundles which are on
my system. So XP accepts that and proceeds to use them but abruptly
without any comment, abandons the process half way at some point and
gives a blue screen.

So I am wondering if I should download the correct Catalyst bundle from
the ATI site afresh and then try installation. But ATI does not give a
ready list to say which Catalyst bundle to use for each of their
vintage cards.

Does anyone know which Catalyst bundle works for the Card mentioned
above? If not, what is the alternative to Radeon if not Pinnacle which
is not a Grrphic Card? Sorry, that slipped my attention, while raising
the question.

P.Jayant