ATI Radeon 3100 Problems

I need some help with my ATI card. Let me give a little bit of background as I lay out the situation I'm working on. A couple of months ago I tried updating my driver. Everything installed and it seemed like everything was fine. Then the computer started going into a solid colored screens. It has gone into several colors: black, white, blue, brown, and some screens with vertical lines going down the screen. It started off occasionally, but became more consistent.

I thought it was a Vista issue (long story) and upgraded to 7. To make a longer story short, I have just reformatted my HDD and put 7 on it fresh and new. It seemed like it was going to work but the screen has started the solid colors again. I've called MS support and they are at a loss of what to do, but through their help we were able to see that it is an issue with the ATI video card. If I disable the video card all works fine, but with poor graphics of course.

It looks like a possible driver issue, so I've tried updating to the latest driver. The driver won't install though. I've even tried manually installing the driver but windows keep saying that the latest driver is already installed. When looking at the driver properties it clearly looks like a very old driver is running, but I can't get the new version to install at all. The CCC goes through the installation process fine but no change on the driver version even if I try a different version. I've uninstalled the video card, and then tried again, but no success.

Attached is pic of the properties screen I'm getting showing which version is installed.

Here what I have:

Toshiba Satellite laptop
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
ATI Radeon 3100
250 GB HDD
AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-84
4GB RAM

Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for the welcome.

I've been to ATI's download page many times trying to get a package/driver that would install but none of them update the driver for some reason. That is when I switched to trying the manual driver installation, but that it isn't even working.

There is a very good reason that the reference AMD driver won't install on that laptop. This is from the release notes for the latest catalyst 10.12,

The following notebooks are not compatible with this release:

• Any notebook launched after this driver release
• Switchable Graphics enabled notebooks using Intel® chipsets.
• Toshiba® notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
• Sony® VAIO® notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
• Panasonic® notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)

AMD Catalyst

Basically unless you want to try something like this,

AMD Catalyst

on one of the recent driver versions, you're pretty much stuck with whatever Toshiba has available.

If they don't have a Windows 7 driver for your particular laptop (and for all intents and purposes there is zero reason for them not too), you could try looking up a new model laptop with an AMD video card in it and try the driver for it.

myzr7 said:

JR did you visit the web site that I linked you to. They have some instructions on how to uninstall you old driver which is what I thought you was having trouble with?

Yes. But the problem is installing not uninstalling.

stormy13 said:

There is a very good reason that the reference AMD driver won't install on that laptop. This is from the release notes for the latest catalyst 10.12,

The following notebooks are not compatible with this release:

• Any notebook launched after this driver release
• Switchable Graphics enabled notebooks using Intel® chipsets.
• Toshiba® notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
• Sony® VAIO® notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
• Panasonic® notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)

AMD Catalyst

Basically unless you want to try something like this,

AMD Catalyst

on one of the recent driver versions, you're pretty much stuck with whatever Toshiba has available.

If they don't have a Windows 7 driver for your particular laptop (and for all intents and purposes there is zero reason for them not too), you could try looking up a new model laptop with an AMD video card in it and try the driver for it.

Wow! I would've never have thought that would've been a possibility. I'll check Toshiba as I know they have a driver for it. Is this just for the latest driver?

Nope. Up until about a year or so ago it applied to pretty much all laptop manufacturers regardless of whether they used ATI or Nvidia graphics, part of some licensing agreement that they would only allow the drivers when provided by them.

With the exception of the three mentioned above or if you have switchable graphics (usually Intel integrated (on the motherboard or more recently in the CPU itself) paired up with either an ATI or Nvidia video card), most of the laptop manufacturers will now allow the reference drivers to support whichever GPU they used. here is what Nvidia had to say about it,

NVIDIA Verde Notebook Drivers

and pretty sure that the same three that still won't allow it from ATI/AMD applies to Nvidia drivers.

One thing that can happen with using the reference drivers is that they may not have the included support for the screen used in the laptop, or whatever power saving features where built into them. As a result while the reference drivers will install and work, they may not fully support all features in the laptop.

stormy13 said:

Nope. Up until about a year or so ago it applied to pretty much all laptop manufacturers regardless of whether they used ATI or Nvidia graphics, part of some licensing agreement that they would only allow the drivers when provided by them.

With the exception of the three mentioned above or if you have switchable graphics (usually Intel integrated (on the motherboard or more recently in the CPU itself) paired up with either an ATI or Nvidia video card), most of the laptop manufacturers will now allow the reference drivers to support whichever GPU they used. here is what Nvidia had to say about it,

NVIDIA Verde Notebook Drivers

and pretty sure that the same three that still won't allow it from ATI/AMD applies to Nvidia drivers.

One thing that can happen with using the reference drivers is that they may not have the included support for the screen used in the laptop, or whatever power saving features where built into them. As a result while the reference drivers will install and work, they may not fully support all features in the laptop.

That makes sense in a way. I've successfully installed the Toshiba driver, so we'll see if the crashes are fixed. I'll soon find out.

I've downloaded the drivers and everything updated fine. However, the updates have not fixed the issue. The screen is still crashing with solid colored screens. The first time the screen went white with black lines, then it has been mostly blue with light vertical lines, and then the screen has gone all black. Nothing works, the computer locks up, and the only solution is powering down. If I disable the video card in device manager then everything works. Any other ideas?