Latest drivers for Radeon 9000 Mobility?

[ERP]

Bought myself a laptop, so I could work away from my desk, cleaned off the harddrive and reinstalled everything. I come to reinstall the video driver and discover that the latest ATI drivers won't install on mobile parts.

They give some rather weak excuse about drivers being optimised by the vendor for certain display/card combinations :roll:

Does anyone know where I can get the latest drivers for the Radeon 9000 Mobility?

[demalion]

Short answer: ask your laptop manufacturer, or search for "omega drivers" on www.driverheaven.net or www.rage3d.com, and read about them.

Long answer:
Laptop vendors want to control driver releases (if they are the one providing customer support, anyways). Since they are highly customized (at this point in time), this policy makes sense, as they do this to certify the interaction of various general purpose drivers for their specific configuration.

The drivers you have will work for your laptop, but depending on the configuration, this might cause problems, since extensively customized laptops might have unique issues. The laptop manufacturer is the one who is supposed to handle these issues, just like a graphics card maker is the one who would recognize and address issues with their specific graphics card, so due to agreement on this between ATI and the manufacturer, the standard drivers don't install to laptops.

I think it has been the trend that laptops are becoming more general, like desktop computers, so at some point this policy might not make sense anymore, but AFAIK it still does.

For future reference, a search on www.Rage3D.com will uncover tons of threads relating to Radeon related issues as common as this one, and you should find more solutions there, likely including instructions on how you could cause your laptop chip to be recognized by the standard drivers.