XP Video Drivers On Vista

I just obtained a copy of Windows Visa Ultimate for testing my
company's software. I needed drivers for ATI M6P Radeon Mobility 16MB
video adapter (dell latitude C510/610), but the ATI Catalyst 7 doesn't
work with this video card. Since ATI probably won't be releasing a
Vista driver for this legacy hardware anytime soon, I decided to try
using an XP driver.

I downloaded the driver Radeon_M6P_PCI-ID_4C59_v6.13.10.6243 from
DriverGuide.com, ran the self-extracting exe, and canceled the
install. Now the driver is sitting in "c:\ATI_Driver". Using the the
device manager, I updated the driver to use the XP driver. Vista
didn't complain about the driver not being compatible, and everything
went ok. After restarting, the display was ok except that it was using
16 bit color @ 1024x168, and wouldn't accept 32 bit color.
Uninstalling the adapter and restarting the computer did the trick.

This will probably work with other video cards as well (I read
somewhere that Vista uses the same video graphics stack as XP).

It often works on 32bit Vista .... I've never seen it work on 64bit where
all drivers must be digitally signed.
--
Cari (MS-MVP)
Windows Technologies - Printing & Imaging
http://www.coribright.com/windows

<> wrote in message
news: ups.com...
>I just obtained a copy of Windows Visa Ultimate for testing my
> company's software. I needed drivers for ATI M6P Radeon Mobility 16MB
> video adapter (dell latitude C510/610), but the ATI Catalyst 7 doesn't
> work with this video card. Since ATI probably won't be releasing a
> Vista driver for this legacy hardware anytime soon, I decided to try
> using an XP driver.
>
> I downloaded the driver Radeon_M6P_PCI-ID_4C59_v6.13.10.6243 from
> DriverGuide.com, ran the self-extracting exe, and canceled the
> install. Now the driver is sitting in "c:\ATI_Driver". Using the the
> device manager, I updated the driver to use the XP driver. Vista
> didn't complain about the driver not being compatible, and everything
> went ok. After restarting, the display was ok except that it was using
> 16 bit color @ 1024x168, and wouldn't accept 32 bit color.
> Uninstalling the adapter and restarting the computer did the trick.
>
> This will probably work with other video cards as well (I read
> somewhere that Vista uses the same video graphics stack as XP).
>