ATI Radeon 7500 and Dell 2405 LCD

Reformatting a Windows installation every 6-12 months should be commonplace among Windows users. From newbies to seasoned professionals, every Windows installation should be re-imaged, re-installed, or re-formatted.

I don't know what it is about Windows - and it's not isolated to any specific version - but, your system slows down the more you use it, the more you install on it. That's why I recommend reinstalling Windows on it every 6-12 months. It gets rid of all the crap you've built up on your machine.

Every piece of software writes something to your hard drive and there is always a chance that something gets left behind if you uninstall it. I kind of miss the days when all the necessary files were in a single directory - no registry, no SYSTEM32 folder. Just a directory in \Program Files and thats it. If you ever find the need to get rid of the program, just delete the directory and voila.

I spoke too soon. I had it working for a while, then uninstalled Powerstrip. Back to square 1. Ignore the following paragraphs.

So upon following my own advice I had wiped out my trusty Dell Inspiron 4150 P4 1.6ghz laptop. Copying important files was easy since I have accustomed myself to storing everything in the "C:\Active Backup" folder technique. Everything of importance goes in there - Outlook .PST file, camera .JPEGs, .WAV and .MP3 files - you name it.

The one thing I completely forgot about were my video card drivers for the integrated ATI Radeon 7500 in the laptop and/or the docking station (I used the trick of flashing the Inspiron BIOS to the Latitude BIOS to get the docking station to work).

You might be saying, "Just visit the Dell support site for the video card drivers". True in most cases that may work, but I have a fantastic Dell 2405FPW LCD 24" monitor. And, I am one of those few individuals who want to preserve their eyesight so I don't set the maxium resolution to 1900x1200. I find the most comfortable to be 1280x768. Very comfortable to view, and the aspect ratio of icons and text seems to be perfect.

But none of the Dell ATI drivers support this resolution. And to top things off, the readily available ATI Catalyst drivers are useless for integrated graphics cards. I managed to find another set of drivers for ATI cards called "Omega Drivers" . But alas, there were dozens of different versions. The most recent causes BSOD gpfs. The oldest caused the screen to display black bars on the top and bottom, or left and right. It was not until I found a specific version - 2.6.53 that did the trick.

So for all of you who have a similar setup to me (very unlikely, but nonetheless) this has made my day.

1. Uninstall your Dell ATI drivers
2. Get the Omega v2.6.53 drivers from : Driver Heaven .Net
3. Install them and reboot

As a special note, PowerStrip may have played a small part in producing this custom resolution but I have yet to figure out for sure.