Csabi's blog

If you own an ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics adapter and you are a Windows 2000 user you are probably having nightmares because ATI doesn't offer support & drivers for Win 2k. And if it happens that your card is on AGP slot, you are almost doomed. Add to this 2 monitors and you are know in my shoes.

So, I had this computer with Win 2000 Pro which got a new video card (that ATI mentioned above) because I wanted dual DVI output and dual display on that PC. Than the pain begun...

But making long story short, after 2 days of desperate testing I found only this solution to install the driver and make the dual monitor work:

Step 1:
- you need a little program to convert ATI XP drivers to 2000 drivers.
- you can get Bernhard's (berna) converter here:
http://www.filefactory.com/dlf/f/7bafdb/b/3/h/1adf9399f1508d5700bc1d8e80739b466be33c08/e/1adf9399f1508d5700bc1d8e80739b466be33c08/j/0/n/Win2k_ati_app_rar
or here:
http://www.nukular.ch/ConvertCatalysXP-2K.zip

Step 2:
- you need a driver which will work ... that's the hard part
- I've red about people having success with driver version 8.3
- Others had success with the AGP patch driver from ati
- Others had success with the driver provided by the card's manufacturer for XP on the disk
- I had success ONLY with this driver: version 8.47 beta, and you can download it from here:
http://www.station-drivers.com/telechargement/ati/catalyst/amd_xp_8.475_(www.station-drivers.com).exe

Step 3:
- if your previous attempts didn't definitely destroyed directx on your system, this driver will probably do (it did for me)
- you will have to download and reinstall directix 9.0c

Step 4 (dual monitor):
- at this point you should have working graphics on at least 1 monitor (display)
- to set up multiple displays, you need ATI Catalist Control Center (CCC)
- as you can already suspect, all modern drivers come with ATI CCC for XP or Vista, and they don't work on Win 2k
- so you go to ati's page and download the latest available driver (the hole ati suite) for Windows 2000
- you unzip it, go to the Windows XP folder and install what's in there ... if you are asked, you will NOT install the driver, only the CCC and .NET if required.

After all these, now I have a working dualscreen system with ATI HD 3650 and Windows 2000 Pro.

What is not working:
- AGP texture/acceleration - it is kind of working. That PC is for office use, so I can't try games. It is also possible you will have some issues
- AGP communication/acceleration - it had to be manually started from CCC
- the dual display setting doesn't create 2 desktops, one on each display. It creates one wide desktop over 2 screens, so when you maximize a window it will stretch over both of your monitors.

by Csabi