My mother's PC broke down quite suddenly about a week ago. PC would boot but the screen said "NO SIGNAL". Guessing the video card to be at fault, I packed up an old AGP card and some other stuff and drove down to see what I could do.
Bingo! Replaced the card and got Windows visible on the screen again. But it was displaying in 800x600 and 16 colors. Windows 2000 wouldn't recognize the card so it defaulted to "VGA compatible."
Thus began my hunt for a driver. The sticker on the card says "ATI RAGE 128 PRO 32MB". Well, ATI is a major player in the video card business, so it shouldn't be a problem, should it?
"www.ati.com@ redirects to ati.amd.com . Seems ATI wasn't big enough to avoid being swallowed by AMD. OK, so far so good.
There's a "find your driver" page with a nested menu that leads to "legacy drivers" leads to a driver allegedly good for Windows 2000. A half hour download on my mom's 56K line.
What's this? "You need DirectX 8 to run this installer?" I cursed a bit at this craziness and proceeded. Eventually got to the installer and... "This driver is not compatible with the card(s) in your computer."
I spent 4 hours with Google and downloading drivers from other sites. Many sites, such as softpedia.com, give you menus and descriptions and make your mouth all watery... only to send you back to ATI/AMD's page.
Finally found a "reference driver" at www.treiber-world.de that worked. I thank the good folks there, and hope my reference to them doesn't get them in trouble with AMD.
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