Installing the Latest ATI Drivers on an Acer Laptop
I decided to buy a new laptop last month and after poring through reviews I decided to get an Acer Aspire 4920G. I got the submodel(?) 811g16mn which came with 1GB memory (4GB max) and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT. I bumped up the memory to the maximum 4GB to since I plan to run VMWare on Linux. The thing came with Vista Home Premium and after a bit of shoehorning to get a proper dual-boot setup to work, I started to fiddle around with Vista. In spite of all the negative press I have read about Vista, it’s not actually as bad as everyone says. I think I’m keeping Vista on this laptop, I paid for it after all.
There are a some things on this laptop that really irked me. For one, there’s the design. When the thing is closed, it looks like this black gem on your desk. While it’s not as good looking as a Macbook Pro, it’s not half bad either as long as you keep it closed. Opening it is another story, “ceramic” is just a fancy term for “all you get is a boring gray plastic finish”.
Another thing is that the keyboard has that “cheap plastic” feel to it. As a programmer, I spend inordinate amounts of time typing and a good keyboard is a must. There are times when the left Ctrl or Shift key would get stuck and it would pop out making a scary “click” sound. When I first heard that sound, I thought something had just overheated and popped.
But these are minor annoyances compared to the biggest annoyance of all.
Acer calls it “Empowering Technology”. It’s virtually impossible to get just a clean Windows install on new laptops these days without having to go buy a barebones kit and making one yourself. I don’t know what it is with these manufacturers these days but a lot of them have been shipping units without system recovery discs. My wife’s HP Compaq laptop didn’t come with a recovery disc and neither did this Acer. They want you to burn your own copy of the recovery discs on DVD+R. Say what?!? In my experience, those things don’t even last more than a year even if kept in a “cool, dark place”. I really don’t understand why they can’t just provide a pressed DVD like they used to. If this is supposed to stop piracy, then it’s not working. I have seen OEM copies of Vista floating around on “scener” sites and on TPB, fully patched to SP1 and the latest updates! “Empowering” indeed.
While I can live with not having pressed recovery DVD’s and pre-installed crapware, the thing that really irks me the most is the fact that I cannot upgrade my ATI drivers. I tried downloading the latest drivers from the ATI website but they won’t install. Even though the installer finishes without problems, it does not install the latest CCC and the drivers. It stays stuck on the drivers provided by Acer which are over a year old. After a bit of searching I found this statement from ATI:
Currently AMD does not provide any driver support for Mobility Radeon™ products. All driver and technical support for Mobility Radeon™ products is provided by the original laptop or notebook manufacturer. The drivers that are available for download at ati.amd.com are for desktop products only.
To download Windows Vista Mobility Radeon™ drivers or driver updates for your laptop or notebook product, please visit your laptop or notebook manufacturer’s website.
So I’m stuck with the Acer provided drivers? The suck just keeps on getting stronger on this one. While I can understand the reasoning behind this, OEM’s want to be able to control everything on both hardware and software fronts as much as possible. They modify the drivers to make sure that they work properly. But the only modifications I can see on the Acer provided drivers is that the CCC is crippled to the point of being completely useless. There is no “Advanced” CCC with the Acer provided drivers. The “Advanced” CCC is important because there are many tweaks and settings that you can only access using the “Advanced” view. Most important for me is the option to “Preserve Aspect Ratio” when switching from 16:9 to 4:3 resolutions. Some games I am running do not have support for widescreen and so I have to fall back to using standard resolutions (800×600).
I have heard of the so-called “Omega ATI Drivers” which are supposed to allow you to install the ATI Desktop drivers on ATI Mobility hardware. At the time of writing, they only support Windows XP. After a few more days of searching I finally stumbled on this thread from FPSLabs Forums which led me to this website. After following the instructions on DriverHeaven.net, I was able to install the latest ATI drivers with a full-featured CCC. So far, everything seems to be going along swimmingly. I must stress that following the instructions on DriverHeaven.net may probably void your warranty as you will be running unsigned drivers (not signed by WHQL). But I have read my Warranty Information Booklet and there is nothing in there that implicitly or explicitly states that installing the “reference” drivers from ATI will void my product warranty. It is clear though that I cannot expect any help from either ATI or Acer if there are any problems caused by the driver.
Remember, if things go haywire you can always undo the driver installation using Vista’s “System Restore” feature.
March 24th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Hi there I have the same problem with my Acer Traverlamte 7720G on a Vista32, with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600. I accidentally updated the driver and then problems started. I went to driverheaven, followed the instructions, even the new mods for the new version of the driver and ccc ie. 9.3. Still didn’t work. I am considering returning to the driver 8.4 provided by Acer. How did you get the MM to work?
March 24th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I noticed that ATI drivers since last February are no longer being installed even if I ran Mobility Modder on the installer. It looks like ATI has fixed this “issue” and MM needs to be updated to take this into account. All I really care about is the Catalyst Control Center anyway. It still installs fine, plus Acer seems to have published an official ATI driver update last February.
May 29th, 2009 at 12:37 am
Hi, I have used the Mobility Modder software to allow me to install the most up-to-date drivers on my laptop. This works great for most things but there are a couple things to note if you plan on doing it too: 1) One of the reasons that Acer (and other manufacturers I assume) manage the drivers themselves is that they are written to prevent the graphics chipset from overheating – i.e. you probably wont be getting the full power of your GPU but it wont overheat. I found that as long as I keep the underside of the laptop off of soft surfaces running the latest drivers hasn’t been a problem 2) My Acer Aspire laptop came with a Blu Ray player and included Acer Arcade Deluxe as the software player for Blu Ray discs. However, this software doesn’t work with unsigned drivers! I have found that Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 3 does work, but you’ll have to spend some cash to get it, which is annoying when the Acer software comes free with the laptop. I decided to downgrade the drivers back to the ones supplied by Acer (from their website) and they still come up as unsigned so I’m still stuck with the software not working to play BD discs. I think now that my only option to get the original software working again are to use the recovery discs I burnt when I bought the laptop