Pandora Bookmarklet

OK, so after attempted posts elsewhere, below is my bookmarklet which launches the Pandora mini player in a separate window. To use, drag the link at the bottom of this post up into your bookmarks bar of your browser. I've tested it with IE6 and Firefox 1.5. Comment if you have suggestions or changes!

Launch Pandora

Radeon 9100 IGP and "INF error, Video driver not found"

I have to share this tremendous saga of what I went through when I tried to upgrade the video driver on my wife's home computer. I ended up reinstalling Windows 4 times (mostly due to lack of sleep on my part) before I figured out a key fact:

The Radeon 9100 IGP is only supported up until Catalyst 6.5. And, the "Motherboards with integrated graphics" page on ATI's site only includes Catalyst 6.4, and makes absolutely no mention of this fact. So, when you try to install Catalyst 6.8 on a machine with a Radeon 9100 IGP, you get the descriptive errors:

INF Error Video driver not found

Setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup

The news is, if the current version of Catalyst gives you this error, try and install Catalyst 6.4 or 6.5 before you try screwing up your computer. Read on for the many mis-steps I took when I saw this error.

I then made it my mission to get down to a standard VGA driver before I continued. So, I uninstalled all ATI software as outlined here and rebooted. Same error. After browsing around, I found that a lot of people use Driver Cleaner Pro to uninstall the ATI drivers. So, I dutifully downloaded it, installed it, and used it to remove all things ATI, ATI Radeon, and ATI IGP from my system.

Upon rebooting, my computer would start booting up, then reboot. This happened a couple of times before I realized I was good and well hosed.

It turns out that my motherboard has not only integrated ATI video, but also integrated ATI GART and ATI IDE drivers. So, when I did Driver Cleaner's full on uninstall, it blew away some important stuff that kept Windows from booting. Other people had the same problem.

Eventually, I did a Windows repair/reinstall, and got those files copied over. (It really would have been nice to do it in recovery console, saving me the 1.5 hours of downloading and installing the 60+ security patches to Windows XP since SP2) Now, everything's back to normal, except for the stress I underwent during the process.

I used to be a master at fixing computers, now I feel like I'm losing my edge!