New 9600 SE -- Install Disk Trouble (Resolved)

Dyre Straits

My younger son was given a gift card and wanted to apply it to a new graphics card. He and I went together to Best Buy where he selected a B/B ATi 9600 SE (with the HL-2 certificate).

His system (XP Home; 256 MB DDR; P-4 2.4 Ghz) came with an onboard SiS video adapter that I disabled and then uninstalled the drivers from the system prior to commencing with the ATi install.

Once I uninstalled the drivers for the SiS adapter, I shutdown the system and installed the 9600 SE. After the card was firmly installed I booted up the system and XP found New Hardware.

However, it was UNABLE to install a VGA Compatible Adapter. So, I proceeded to attempt to simply install the drivers from the Autostart menu of the ATi CD.

Things seemed to be going along all right until I got a popup: INF Error. The install program could not locate the INF file in order to proceed with the install.

OK...this was getting interesting now.

Eventually, what it took to get the drivers properly installed was to go to the C:\ATI\Support directory and to use the SETUP.EXE for the drivers from there. I repeated the same steps for the Control Panel.

Once I discovered that the installation program from the CD was [apparently] trying to find the INF file on the CD instead of the extracted INF on the HD things went much smoother then.

There's only one thing that's still puzzling: The box says it's a 9600 SE, but the installation from the directory, as done above, shows the card being a 9600 PRO.

Also, the drivers are the CAT 3.4 drivers which surprised me as the BIOS date of the card is 11/13/03. I'd have sort of expected at least the CAT 3.7 maybe. That's no biggie as I'll be able to take a burned copy of the latest drivers up there soon and update it for him. (He's on a very slow dial-up at present.)

Anyway, if anyone else encounters this problem with the INF Error, just navigate to the HD where the files were extracted and start the installation from there.

Hope this helps.

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