I have installed Windows 7 yesterday to my old desktop which has 1,5 GB of RAM, an Intel Mainboard, an ATI Radeon 9200  and an onboard sound card. After the installation system seemed to be running nearly as smooth as Windows XP or at least better than my brother’s new laptop with Vista.

I had two problems. Windows did not recognize my onboard soundcard and my display adapter (ATI Radeon 9200 SE). After the first updates the sound card driver has been installed. But I didn’t have the same luck with my display adapter.

After a short search I have found out that Windows Vista and Windows 7 cannot support my adapter because the lowest DirectX version that they support is 9.0. My display adapter only supports DirectX 8.1. So, I have tried to Install it by using the .inf file of Windows XP driver manually. It worked !!!

Err… with some slight problems. I can run Warcraft 3 Frozen throne as smooth as it was on Windows XP, I can set resolution to higher values and display quality has increased a lot. But I can’t shut down my computer. When I shut down, Windows returns to me with that famous “blue screen”. Without any surprise, it is because of one of the ATI DLLs. I also made a little search and found out that it causes the same problems with sleep and hybernate functions too.

So, If we exclude this “little” problem, Windows 7 runs well for now.

Let’s see what’s going to happen with SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta.

PS: You can download .inf file for ATI Radeon 9200 from here. Just extract the files and do not start installation. After extraction, use update driver option manually from device manager and show the .inf file in the directory you have extracted.

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Tags: ATI Radeon 9200 SE, Driver Download, Driver Problem, Microsoft, Windows 7