Random Thoughts – Randocity!

After a bout of attempting to install the 12/10/08 graphics driver on my ATI Radeon 3650 on 64 bit Vista, I ran into a few glitches… well, many glitches actually.  Glitches upon glitches… I guess you could say it was a clusterbuck (replacing the b with an f).  Anyway, my system was rather messed up after the attempted installation.  Suffice it to say that the 12/10/08 release of the Catalyst driver from ATI is Borked.  It doesn’t run on the 3650 on Vista 64, so don’t even bother.  However, that was only half of my issues.

The other half of the issues consisted of how to recover from the uninstallation of the driver and recovery back to my previous driver.  Unfortunately, Microsoft has completely messed up driver installation and removal on Vista 64.  So, be WARNED if you attempt to upgrade your graphics driver under Vista 64.  Suffice it to say that here’s the short list of steps:

• As best you can, uninstall the ATI Catalyst tool from ‘Programs and Features’.  If that fails…
• Remove all references to ATI and ATI Technologies registry keys from HKLM and HKCU
• Remove all ATI Technologies directories from C:\program files and C:\program files (x86)
• Follow the instructions below to ensure Catalyst Control Manager reinstalls properly:

1.  Check that registry locations are empty:
   •     a. HKCU/Software/ATI/ACE
   •     b. HKLM/Software/ATI/ACE
2.  Check that (Program Files or Program Files(x86)  folder )/ATI Technologies/ATI.ACE is empty
3.  Check (Windows folder)/Assembly folder to see if there’s any files with Public Key Token of “90ba9c70f846762e” (Sort by Public key token to get a easier view). All these tokens should be uninstalled by right clicking and uninstalling.
4. Check that (Document and Settings)/(User)/AppData/Local/ATI/ACE is empty
5. Reinstall CCC

Hopefully, you won’t run into the same issues I did getting Catalyst reinstalled, but if you do run into this issue with your ATI Radeon card, perhaps this will help!  Oh, and who wins?  No one does… Vista sucks for Driver issues.

Disclaimer:  If you don’t know what you’re doing in the registry, don’t go there.  If you accidentally delete something you shouldn’t, that’s your responsibility.  The registry can be a tricky place, so you are hereby warned.  Use this information at your own risk.