[Solved] HD4650 agp drivers won't install

Just bought the AGP Radeon HD 4650 card. Installed the windows Vista drivers from CD (even though I'm using Windows 7). Seemed to be going fine, said I needed to reboot. Windows 7 boot up screen shows up, but just before Windows7 starts the monitors go blank (no signal). Can only get the monitors to work in Safe mode.

Motherboard: AOpen AX4SG Max II

I was able to solve both problems (but ended up with two more):

1) One Screen going blank in Windows -- The HD4650 didn't play nice with my viewsonic monitor. The digital connection would work in the BIOS screen, or when using the Standard VGA Graphics Adapter, but would not work when using Windows 7 with the drivers it came with (or any downloaded drivers). BUT, I was able to get it to work if I used the included Digital --> Analog connector.

2) Both Screens blank at startup -- Both my monitors (My viewsonic and my HannsG) did not work at windows startup. The reason is apparently because I had two users applied to windows. Apparently both monitors did not receive signals from the HD4650 card while displaying the logon screen. So to get around this, I had to guess where the user button was so I could log onto windows. I eventually just deleted all other accounts so it would boot straight to windows without the logon prompt.

3) ATI driver removal uninstall is a Piece of Sh*t. Apparently the problem I was having was that even though I uninstalled the previous drivers using their add/remove programs uninstaller, it was leaving parts of the software on my computer... And, this messes up the correct software. To fix this I had to run a program called "Driver Sweeper" to remove all the left behind ATI software. Follow the instructions on their website (It has to be run in Safe Mode). Once I did that, booted into Windows, Deleted my user accounts, installed their software, and applied the Digital--> Analog converter, everything worked fine... almost.

4) If you are using the AGP version of the card, it's important to note that ATI's website sucks. The driver software that they take you to is for PCIe. I don't believe this will work for your card. I did try using the AGP 4000 hotfix drivers, but that didn't work either. The only drivers I got to work was the ones that came on the CD.

In the end, my computer kept having blue screens while booting up, and something (probably the card) wouldn't allow Windows to refresh or calculate the Windows Experience Index. I decided to return the card. I will never buy an ATI card again. I love their AMD processors, but I've never had such a bad experience with any piece of hardware as I did with this Radeon HD 4650 AGP card.

This sort of worked. Or at least something similar did.

Removing the old ATI drivers didn't work, so I went ahead and uninstalled the driver for the onboard graphics adapter. That didn't work, so (going by the made-in-China advice of the motherboard manufacturer) I went into the Device Manager and also started disabling all the video devices there.

Whoops. In my haste, I got a big scare by accidentally disabling "Vgasave," which is Windows' emergency VGA driver if it detects neither a plug-in card nor an onboard adapter. So Windows would still load and function like normal, only my screen would go dark immediately after the Windows boot screen. Normally you can fix this by booting in Safe Mode, but of course my machine would hang up during the boot process for Safe Mode, so I had to try a number of convoluted fixes that I don't even want to revisit in order to get the video back.

Finally, with no drivers for either ATI or the onboard adapter installed, my system STILL wouldn't recognize the 4650 as anything besides an "unknown VGA device" that it couldn't find drivers for (Trying to install any of the ATI drivers that came with it would lead to a device not recognized error). Finally, after about my 20th unsuccessful attempt at disabling the onboard graphics in the BIOS -- my motherboard had a non-standard BIOS without a real option to disable graphics, of course -- I did a CMOS clear without the card in place, booted and shut down, reinstalled the 4650, booted up again, and it miraculously recognized it. I'd done several CMOS clears before with the card in place, but for some reason it wouldn't recognize it any of those times.

For whatever reason, it works fine now and I have to say I'm happy with the results; it really has rejuvenated that old machine.