Hoping maybe someone here may know a way around this... My wife has a Dell Inspiron 5800 (or something like that number, don't remember it exactly, hopefully it is not that important for the question), which is slightly over 1 year old. This is the standard computer handed to all students at UH's EMBA program. Anyway, it works well, except the graphics driver for the built-in video card needs to be updated (It's an ATI Mobility 1400 I think). So, if I go to ATI's website, they have lots of brand-spankin shiny new video drivers. But wait! We can't install them, because when we try, we get an error saying that we can only go to DELL for driver updates. WTF? Ok, well, go to Dell then. Umm, no. The newest driver they have is from July of 2006. OVER TWO YEARS OLD. I do not believe that Dell has any intention of releasing an updated video driver for this ATI device, even tough ATI has had numerous updates since then. This is the feeling I got after spending about two hours with a very patient lady from India explaining to me that if I would just go to Dell.com I can get the newest drivers they have. And no, no plans for a new one at this time. Bah. So Dell *won't* deliver an updated driver, and they won't *allow* me to update it anywhere else. Anyone else had to deal with this crap? I am hoping there is some kind of a registry work-around or something, or some kind of hacked set of drivers that can bypass this stupid restriction on the computer that my wife OWNS. GRRR Anybody have a ray of hope to offer up? Pretty please?
I assume you can download the driver from ATI to your laptop. From there, can't you go into the system hardware preferences, find the video card, click on update driver and point to where you saved the ATI one?
You can't. I have the same dilemma with my work issued Latitude D610. It stinks to the high heavens, because the current driver has bugs that irritate me on a daily basis. I've been waiting for a couple of years now for Dell to update their drivers and they haven't, so I'm just looking forward to getting a new laptop (and with the state of the economy and the company looking to keep costs down, that probably isn't happening anytime soon either).
Hmm, I just found something -- the DriverHeaven Mobility Modder. I'm giving it a whirl right now, I'll let you know if it works.
It worked like a charm. Where has this thing been all my life? Nero: Go to http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php and follow the instructions on that page. You can also download the Catalyst driver directly from the DriverHeaven.net web site. The Modder tool will modify the downloaded driver so it does not check for the notebook manufacturer before installing.
