Help please?
I've been having some display-related problems with my two-year-old VGN-s2HP. Recently, the display started resetting to an 800x600 box in the center of the screen, accompanied with a message saying "The ATI2dvag display driver has stopped working normally".
Reinstalling Sony's supplied driver did not help, and eventually I decided to reinstall Windows. I a from-scratch reinstall (including a full format of the hard disk first). This was an XP Professional install from OEM media we had at the office, but with the Vaio's own XP Pro product key.
Things went well at first. I installed the drivers Sony supplied with no problems. However, immediately after installing Service Pack 2, the machine became trapped in a reboot cycle. I disabled "restart on critical errors" from the F8 boot menu, and discovered that the video driver - in particular a file called "ati2dvag.dll" - was causing the crash.
Thinking I might be able to sidestep this with more recent install media, I reinstalled from an XP Pro disk that had SP2 included. This time I completed Windows Update first, thinking that this might be a Windows bug that Microsoft has corrected since the SP2 release (grasping at straws, I know). I created a System Restore point and tried to install the video driver again. Predictably, I got exactly the same results as before.
There don't seem to be any other suitable video drivers for this laptop. Sony hasn't released any updates to its sole offered download. The video chipset is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200, and ATI's site isn't any help. Their downloadable drivers don't cover this chipset, and the link to "non-supported manufacturers" is a 404, maybe some kind of a joke.
I've even tried the unofficial Omega Radeon drivers, which will install on just about any ATI chipset. They're not particularly stable, and they don't provide any video acceleration. However, I can get a full-screen display under SP2 with them.
I have heard rumours that this is a hardware problem, but if this is the case, why did the Sony driver work fine under SP1? I'm not keen on going back to SP1, since Microsoft will stop offering security updates for it in about a month's time.
I'm still trying to figure out a good solution to this - is it worth sending the Vaio in for repairs on what appears to be a software problem? I'd really appreciate any more information on this, if anyone can help.
Thankyou,
John Hoare
