The little laptop from hell
So I'm trying to get this combo working for two weeks straight and it's only getting worse:
Toshiba T135D - Turion Neo X2 / Mobile 780G (HD3200) / SB750 (or so software says, I thought it would be a SB710 - so who knows)
Kingston V+200
XP32 SP3 (don't ask. just don't.)
Toshiba doesn't provide any XP drivers or support for this thing, apparently there's a risk doing so would create a supermassive black hole that would kill us all or something. I've done I think 7 or 8 fresh installs testing different drivers until it gets so gunked up I have to wipe it and start over and think I finally have a set of drivers that will work, but for one thing - the damn Catalyst drivers cause a blank black screen pause at startup (after the Windows XP screen but before the blue Welcome screen) which makes the boot time with the SSD more or less equal to the boot time with the standard drive. Which pisses me off.
Is there a work-around for AMD's crap software to prevent this, like maybe pointing Device Manager directly to the .inf files without running the garbage Catalyst installer? (.NET required, for video drivers, really? Why?? And the Mobility chipsets aren't supported in the regular Catalyst packages, the one that works can only be found through AMD's stupid 'driver finder' app, it DOES NOT EXIST for regular download anywhere, and even then there has to be a working video driver installed first even though it's for the wrong chipset, or else the driver finder says there are no ATI components found and fails. 12-6-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql - go search and find a page on amd.com that has a clickable download link for that - I dare you. Makes me miss the old Via 4in1s, at least those usually worked.)
Is there any way to make the Catalyst drivers not suck? Why do they do this? What's the point of building good hardware if it can't be used because your driver team is apparently made up of slave labor from a third-world mental institution?
Toshiba T135D - Turion Neo X2 / Mobile 780G (HD3200) / SB750 (or so software says, I thought it would be a SB710 - so who knows)
Kingston V+200
XP32 SP3 (don't ask. just don't.)
Toshiba doesn't provide any XP drivers or support for this thing, apparently there's a risk doing so would create a supermassive black hole that would kill us all or something. I've done I think 7 or 8 fresh installs testing different drivers until it gets so gunked up I have to wipe it and start over and think I finally have a set of drivers that will work, but for one thing - the damn Catalyst drivers cause a blank black screen pause at startup (after the Windows XP screen but before the blue Welcome screen) which makes the boot time with the SSD more or less equal to the boot time with the standard drive. Which pisses me off.
Is there a work-around for AMD's crap software to prevent this, like maybe pointing Device Manager directly to the .inf files without running the garbage Catalyst installer? (.NET required, for video drivers, really? Why?? And the Mobility chipsets aren't supported in the regular Catalyst packages, the one that works can only be found through AMD's stupid 'driver finder' app, it DOES NOT EXIST for regular download anywhere, and even then there has to be a working video driver installed first even though it's for the wrong chipset, or else the driver finder says there are no ATI components found and fails. 12-6-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql - go search and find a page on amd.com that has a clickable download link for that - I dare you. Makes me miss the old Via 4in1s, at least those usually worked.)
Is there any way to make the Catalyst drivers not suck? Why do they do this? What's the point of building good hardware if it can't be used because your driver team is apparently made up of slave labor from a third-world mental institution?
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OEMs often customize display drivers on laptops, or use customized versions. I wouldn't be mad at AMD, I would be mad at Toshiba, assuming I had a good reason to expect them to make display drivers for an OS that was released 11 years ago.
I'd guess that your best bet is to find a similar, but older laptop, made by Toshiba using the same graphics chipset and see if you can get the OEM driver that they made for XP.
Maybe another option is to consider not rebooting the laptop all the time and hibernating instead. With an SSD, even on XP, coming back alive from hibernate should not be terribly bad.
Good luck.
.net is the language used to write the Catalyst Control Center.
...except for the ~20 second hang before the Welcome screen, which is definitely down to the display driver and not any of the other Catalyst components, or one of the turds-in-the-punchbowl MS likes to occasionally toss in with Windows Update (I guess just for fun), as I've uninstalled it all one at a time and it only stops hanging after the display driver is removed. And even with all the updates and drivers installed, if the ONLY thing I remove is the display driver, the hang goes away.
And according to everything I can find, this is the only driver that's compatible with both the Mobility HD3200 and XP.
Nobody's had this happen with Catalyst drivers before?
And frankly, the suggestion that I should just alter the way I use the thing so as to not notice the broken driver is... well, it's something, not sure what exactly, but it's definitely something, can't quite find the right word to describe it...
That is the only thing I suggest to try, and I have neither your hardware set nor your software set, but have a noticeable lag at startup before a welcome screen, with no AMD stuff in computer. I did find for my needs I needed multiple versions of .net to support various software of various ages, though, that relied on .net for some functionality. So, that can be taken with several grains of salt as far as maybe truely fixing your particular problem, but it MIGHT so given your trials I will suggest trying it.
You are setting yourself up for frustration by asking to cook dinner with a freezer, but as a prerequisite for your help, telling people not to ask why you are trying to cook dinner with a freezer to begin with.
You're options are:
1. Change how you do things to avoid the black screen (don't shut down or restart your laptop)
2. "figure out what the drivers are doing at that time ... tweak your display settings to avoid the blank black screen"
3. Don't use Windows XP
4. Find something useful to do during the 20 seconds the black screen displays so you don't feel so angry with the world and instead feel productive
The best thing you can do at this point:
1. Pick one from the above
2. Point to the drivers that finally worked 95% of the way for you so others who find this thread in the future can at least get as far as you have
Let me be a little more specific about the Catalyst driver since it seems you missed it first time around. 12-6-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql.exe is not available for direct download from AMD, no download link exists on any page at amd.com. The plain text string 12-6-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql doesn't even exist on amd.com. It's floating around out there from third parties, but anyone who uses packages from super magic all-singing all-dancing download-every-driver-you-ever-dreamed-of sites deserves whatever they get. The only way to get 12-6-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc_whql.exe, from AMD, on one of the blacklisted notebook models, is to force install an .inf file from another incompatible Catalyst package first. Then once it's ID'd as something made by AMD and not 'unknown', running AMD's 'driver downloader' app will grab the 12.6 Legacy package from a trustworthy server. I snatched the file out of the temp folder after the driver finder downloaded it but before the unpacking/install so I could drag it off to a nice quiet secluded spot and poke at it with a pointed stick at my leisure and try to figure out why the hell this has to be such an ordeal.
12-6-legacy_xp32_dd_ccc.exe (note the missing '_whql') will not install on the Toshiba, it is a different package.
Similarly, 12-6_xp32_dd_ccc.exe (note the missing '-legacy') will not install either, it too is a different package.
All other Catalyst packages have a poison pill in them, specifically blocking install on certain brands. From the release notes on recent normal Catalyst packages: The 12.6 Legacy is the only one I know of that does not object to being installed on a Toshiba, and will install all the Catalyst components including the display driver just fine with no indication it's not going to be happy in its new home. Why AMD would still partner with anyone who gets to use the AMD name to sell stuff, but then cripple the hardware on purpose so that it will never work with anything but buggy proprietary third-party drivers I'll never understand. That's what I'm pissed at. I'm not pissed because I can't figure out how to install a display driver.
Regular-release Catalyst packages would not install the display driver even when it was still on the original 7-64 the notebook shipped with, only worked with Toshiba-supplied drivers (and even then constantly did the "ATI Display driver stopped responding..." thing). I have done this same 'downgrade' to XP on a similar-era Gateway Core Duo/943GML, another one with no official drivers for XP, and it went just fine. Runs great.
And JUST THINK, all this just because I wanted to know if anyone had seen similar behavior with Catalyst drivers, and if there was a known fix for it. Jesus H. on a stick.
Yes, this happens with either all, or none, of the 140-whatever post-SP3 updates installed. I did get a glitch after the .NET 4 client profile update that causes a 2min delay before any of the Service Control Manager components load, but that seems to happen on all XP machines after that particular update. Quick fix by setting .NET NGEN service to manual startup instead of auto.
So we can suggest clues as to how to fix, but logically Toshiba is messing up if they build stuff with needs for proprietary hardware needs in order to make a profit on innocents who try everything. I have bought Dell and Lenovo computers for years, and told people to trash Toshibas before.
I have also rolled back to XP from Vista(I hated Vista that much), and got XP working fine, on several machines, but not tried to roll back to XP from 7. I no longer have a XP CD, and never had a XP 64 bit CD. you might try one of those, if you can come by one. Very late in the XP life cycle, an OEM XP Pro subversion was RTM'd by Microsoft. With your hardware currently, you might do well with that subversion if you can find someone with one left that they will part with. I am figuring with your device and core system delays you are trying a 32-bit XP install, but that is an educated guess.