Windows 7 and VisionTek *ATI Radeon* X1300 AGP

Hi,

Microsoft has supplied their own video driver for this card and I can't update it to anything from ATI/Visiontek since the Microsoft driver claims to be the latest.

Yes I know I'm running the RC of Win7, but this is supposed to have all the latest drivers and such, but the SecondLife client gives me a notice that the drivers are either out of date, incorrect for my card or incompatible with Secondlife. I've tried the release build and the release candidate build of the SL client, neither want to work with this card in Win 7.

I should note that my system is a dual-boot Win XP Pro / Win7 system and on the XP boot, the SL client runs properly, but Win7 does have some performance boosts over XP, for one the network stack is much more efficient. I downloaded the SL client while booted into XP and while booted into Win 7. What I saw was a download speed of roughly 180K/sec in XP, and nearly 940K/sec in Win7, and the downloads were only minutes apart.

Back to the video issue...

I hope that when Win7 releases officially that this can be resolved. I'd like to see how well SL runs on the Win7 RC before I purchase Windows 7. Secondlife is very important to me for a number of reasons, so I want to make sure it's going to work with the Windows 7 OS before I buy the Windows 7 OS.

For the record, please no accusations of being a n00b to either computers or SecondLife - I've worked professionally in computers for a long time, and have the position now of SQA manager where I work. I realize that LindenLabs may not be willing to fix something for a release candidate OS, but just in case they are, and are listening, I'll work with you to help test a new version, give you any specs you need etc - after all I built my system myself, so I know it inside and out.

Any suggestions out there?

Download the Vista drivers from ATI. You may need to get something earlier than 9.3, I think that's when ATI stopped supporting older adapters like the X1300.

If they won't install, uninstall the Windows drivers, then reinstall the card and instead of letting Windows autodetect it, manually install the standard VGA then install the drivers from ATI.

Thanks, I'll give that a try a bit later.

Update: I think it's just time I get a more up to date video card especially since my model is already "legacy" (it's about a year or so old) - such is life in the bigger, faster & better hardware market...

Update #2: except that it appears if I stick with ATI/NVIDIA, I'll not only have to replace my video card, but also my AGP mainboard since all of their advertised cards are PCI-X, so looks like getting onto SecondLife in Windows 7 just got a whole lot more expensive ... :/

I contacted LL support and their answer right now is that Windows 7 is not yet supported.

Is there any news as to when Windows 7 will be supported by SL?

It's less a matter of Linden Lab supporting Windows 7 than it is the companies who made the hardware in your computer supporting it.

If you have an ATI graphics adapter older than the HD2400 series, there will probably not be a native Windows 7 driver for it, ever. You will need to try to get a Vista driver to install and work, or upgrade to a DirectX 10 graphics adapter.

AGP is a whole other issue, as it's obsolete and neither ATI nor Nvidia are developing new graphics chipsets for it. Some companies are adapting ATI's HD chips to AGP cards, but they come with their own set of issues since that's a configuration ATI doesn't support.

It took some shoe-horning to get the ATI drivers in place, and some experimentation to find the build that had support for my card, but once done, SL is now running, for anyone else who runs into this problem and has my model or similar card, you may want to try the driver version 8.12, 12/10/2008 - that's the last driver set that had support for my card.

The ATI legacy section for Vista 32 bit (which btw works on Win7 32 bit) can be found here:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Legacy/previous/Pages/radeonaiw_vista32.aspx

Long story short, problem on my system resolved.

As for Windows 7 support, the jist is that I've heard LL will eventually be supporting it, but the tech I was speaking to does not know when - that is very typical of support - I've worked in support and worked my way up to support/QA manager. It's not that support is clueless (which they are not), it's that either they truly are not given the information as to when proposed support for Win7 will be ready, or that they are told not to give out that information yet, in case something else comes up in testing that delays the official support.

From a customer standpoint I'd rather hear "We're working on it but we're not sure when" than to get a false hope/promise of X date only to find out later that it was delayed due to an unforseen issue.

Patience folks, I'm sure that LL is working on the support for Windows 7.

And Thanks a million for the suggestion to back-rev the ATI drivers to find the package that would work with my setup - worked like a charm

I am about to go out and buy a laptop with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M installed. I should be able to find the drivers for it that will allow SL to run so will let you all know.. Thanks for the information.

I'm running that GPU on Windows 7 now. The latest driver from Nvidia's site works very well.