mobility radeon 7500 - help required

[Dark Atheist]

i have a compaq (hp) evo n610c laptop with an ati mobility radeon 7500 32mb graphics card in it (i know, its poo!) but for what i use the laptop for it does its job - now under xp i can get all the drivers from hp site and everything is rosey, under vista it finds all hardware except the ati card, i have tried to force it to use different drivers, and although that works and i can watch most things (avi etc) i cannot get it to play dvds, does anyone know of a work around or link for some drivers that might help?

i have googled for many an hour and nothing helps so far, and im not going to throw away the laptop and get another one just becuase i cant get the vid card working, as the specs arent that bad still (not greate but doesthe job)

Thanks

 

[madmatt]

Sadly, AMD/ATI does not support anything older than the 9500 series under Vista. I am unaware of a workaround.

 

[Dark Atheist]

the work around i have used it to select the mobility 9000 wdm driver - which does work to a degree, and i have heard some ppl saying they have got a driver for that card from windows update although i cant seem to find one there

 

[Shamus MacNoob]

Why would anyone pay for Vista on a laptop that old? I mean if you have XP and it works! What do you need Vista for ? What function in Vista is a must that you would have spent money for a new OS for such an old laptop?

 

[Dark Atheist]

was a look at vista to see if it was ok to use on desktop, not going to test it on my main pcs looks good - all the extra services look a right pain, and mem use is high even when idle, so am rethinking it, plus ultimate being £300+ in the UK it is deff a think before you buy thing, main pc should handle it but only has a gb ram in there, and money is tight atm so mem upgrade is not an option, and i dont think the readyboost will work as i dont think my flash key is up to it

 

[NetRyder]

Some of the early builds of Vista were able to pull down drivers for the Mobility Radeon 7500 from Windows Update (I remember testing it on my old Dell laptop), but they dropped support for it closer to the end of the beta period.

I've heard of the Radeon 9000 driver workaround too, but as Shamus said, it's probably not a good idea to run Vista on a laptop that old anyway.

 

[Dark Atheist]

i know but i cant afford to get a new one yet being unemployed atm, still it runs everything else fine, just not dvds, which as a work laptop (carrys all my toools for me to fix ppls pcs) its not doing a bad job, sticking in the extra 768mb ram (for xp at the time) dont half help , ah well re-install xp it is then