Can't uninstall old Matrox driver after Win 7 upgrade

[john970]

I have a Matrox M9120 PCIe x16 graphics card. It was running fine in Vista x64 with the 1.0.3.35 driver. I ran the Windows 7 x64 upgrade, and everything seemed to be OK until I discovered that I couldn't open Windows Media Center or view DVDs or other videos. I tried to upgrade to the latest Matrox driver, which supports Windows 7, but the old driver wouldn't uninstall.

I contacted Matrox tech support and was advised that I should have uninstalled the old Matrox driver BEFORE upgrading to Windows 7. They said that Windows 7 has locked in the old driver but cannot recognize it so that it can be uninstalled because it is not a Windows 7 compatible driver. They added that the ONLY solution is to do a clean install of Windows 7.

This is outrageous. No such information appears on the Matrox website, and Matrox did not notify me of the terrible consequences of upgrading to Windows 7 without uninstalling the Matrox driver even though I registered the M9120 with them last January and provided my email address. Matrox knows that every customer faces a potential disaster when upgrading to Windows 7 but covers up the mess rather than notifying registered owners of the simple step to take prior to upgrading.

I'm not going to do a clean install but will use the Matrox card without the ability to play videos for the time being in the hope that some smart techie will figure out how to uninstall the old Matrox driver from Windows 7. If that doesn't happen, I'll buy some other fanless video card and replace the partially functional Matrox card.

 

[torrentg]

Very unfamiliar with your video card. Matrox plain out lied to you in hopes of ridding your problems on them. Read: They didn't want to deal with you.

Here's how I would proceed:

Right click the card in the device manager. Update driver software. Browse. Let me pick. Have disk. Browse. Now find the .inf that is part of the driver install package. Click on it in the navigation pane. If you only have an .exe to install, run it and hopefully it will extract someplace first. The .inf will be wherever it extracts to whether that be on C: root or a temporary folder for your system or user profile.

You should be using the Vista driver version for this process. Follow it closely and do not alter any steps.

Good luck! And tell them to stop lying to customers. Show them this thread if you must.

P.S. Removal of old driver not necessary.

 

[john970]

Thanks for your guidance. Before calling Matrox, I tried to extract the exe file, the only file they provide. While the exe file was running, the screens suddenly went black and the computer did not respond. I hit the reset button and rebooted in Safe Mode. It rebooted to an unresponsive black screen. I hit the reset button again and followed the prompts to do a System Restore, which brought me back to where I started.

(Under Vista x 64, the M9120 PCIe x16 card was a great business graphics card that I'm using to support a pair of 24" monitors running at 1920x1200. It's fanless and runs cool and was stable at all times in Vista.)

 

[torrentg]

Looked into it for you. Here's Windows 7 driver. Install normally.


http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/drivers/download/?id=350

Post any errors or difficulties and I'll advise.

 

[john970]

That's the exe file I unsuccessfully tried to run. It's the only file available from Matrox.

 

[torrentg]

Alright. I'm ftping it right now. I'll see if I can extract from it.

Uploading for you now. It will be about 15 minutes. It's ~40 MB and I only have ~50KB/sec.

 

[torrentg]

Here ya go. Follow instructions in post #2. Use W7MSerX64.inf.

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[john970]

Thanks very much for your outstanding support. I installed the Win7 x64 driver you extracted. Then, after rebooting, I went back to Device Manager and installed the whole package, which replaced the old version of Matrox PowerDesk that doesn't work with the new driver. After rebooting again, I set up the new version of PowerDesk, which enables hot key switching between monitors. Now everything works as it did in Vista x64. The old Matrox driver still appears in the list of programs to uninstall, but it doesn't seem to be causing any problems. (It can't be uninstalled with right-click uninstall.)

 

[torrentg]

You're very welcome. Glad I could help.