Dave-H

I think the duplication of the processor entries is because the two cores are recorded separately. In the previous netbook there were four entries! Not sure about the Motherboard Resources though....... The monitors were added automatically when the driver was installed, although there was only "Default Monitor" and "Plug and Play Monitor", I have no idea where the other "Default Monitor" has come from! Do you think I should delete everything in Safe Mode and let the Plug and Play system set everything up again? To belatedly answer @cdob, the previous netbook was also fairly recent so I'm sure wouldn't have been AGP based. It was another integrated CPU and graphics device, but an Intel Atom rather than AMD.

OK, booted into VGA mode, the graphics hardware doesn't seem to be connected to any interface in the PCI bus at all! It just appears as a separate entry in its own right. It says it's on "PCI bus 0, device 1, function 0".

Thanks guys! The machine will boot into VGA mode using the F8 menu. I've now found that trying to change the resolution settings will cause the BSOD even when Windows is running. Looking at the bootlog after a BSOD boot failure, it appears the the graphics driver ati2mtag.sys is loading OK, so it's something that's happening later that's causing the BSOD. The bootlog doesn't seem to give any clue as to what that is unfortunately. Thanks for that reference @RainyShadow, that's very interesting, although talking about a completely different type of system I suspect. Yesterday it did boot just once into the correct driver OK, but I now can't reproduce that! The screen came up asking what folder I wanted to boot from ("Windows XP on D:\" in this case) as if I'd used the F8 menu, although I didn't think that I had, and when I said OK it started up fine. The problem is I don't know why it was showing me that menu. I've tired other options from the F8 menu, but haven't been able to do it again.

OK, further thoughts! The file quoted on the BSOD is not the actual driver file, which is ati2mtag.sys, it's ati2dvag. Looking in the registry, that appears to be the name of the driver, and all the settings and configuration parameters are set under it. I'm now wondering if it's doing some operation on boot, which is looping and causing the crash, which it doesn't do when the driver is started from within Windows. I did think it a bit odd that even after installing the driver from scratch, it didn't insist on a reboot after the installation finished, in fact it just worked. Only on a subsequent boot does it fail, but I suspect that it's not the actual driver loading that's causing the problem. If it was it would crash when being enabled when Windows is running. Does that make any sense?

@dencorso Thanks Den, I restored the "Service Installation" section to the INF file, and it did then install, but couldn't start, the ubiquitous "code 10"! @RainyShadow Thanks, that was good thinking! I did the install again, everything was great, the display looked really good, and the refresh rate was fine. I then disabled in Autoruns everything related to the driver, when I rebooted as expected it reverted to the VGASAVE driver. I then enabled just the ATI driver (ati2mtag.sys), and nothing else, and it rebooted to the usual BSOD. I think we're running out of options here, unless anyone else has any suggestions. It looks as if the driver itself will not load on booting up, so unless I go through the rignarole of disabling the adapter before I shut down, and then re-enable it once the system has booted, which does work, I see no way around it. Such a shame, it seemed to be so close to working! BTW, I now have 1366x768 resolution with 32 bit colour in Safe Mode, which is something I never thought I would ever see, certainly not on XP!

Thanks @jaclaz, that has helped quite a bit! Now I don't know whether to just use this as it is, or still hold out to see if a better driver is possible. The fact that the ATI driver did work, although it wouldn't stay working over a reboot, leads me to think that it must be possible. I imagine it's just a matter as we said of pruning the INF file down to just install the driver and nothing else. If it won't work like that then it's probably time to give up! I did try removing all the "Service Installation" and "Software Installation" sections from the INF, but when I tried that it said it wasn't an XP compatible driver, so I must have removed something which has to be there!

OK, it seems it's now using a driver called "VGASAVE", which I'd not heard of before. Apparently it's the Windows driver it falls back to if there is no other graphics driver installed, or the system is in Safe Mode. I must say I had always assumed that the basic VGA driver was exactly that though, a VGA only driver, so I'm still surprised that it seems to be able produce higher resolutions than basic 640x480 with 8 bit colour.

OK, curiouser and curiouser! I had run Autoruns in the past on my main machine, but never on the netbook. When I ran it, it found quite a few orphaned registry entries, mainly where the files they referred to were no longer on the system. I cleaned it all up and everything was fine. I still had the extra tabs in the Display Properties advanced settings window though. I finally looked more closely at the error logs from when they crashed, and it turned out that the culprit was "emgdgui.dll", which of course turned out to be the Intel graphics user interface! Once that was gone and removed from the registry, the tabs were gone. So, I now had a machine clean of any graphics drivers. All the Intel and ATI/AMD files and registry entries had gone. Now here's the strange bit! On a whim I decided to try the resolution control on the Display Properties window, and to my amazement I found I could change it to a higher level (1366x768 with 32 bit colour) and it worked! The resolution changed, and it stuck. Even after a reboot, the resolution setting was still fine. The only thing I could find wrong was that the refresh rate seemed to be poor. So, how can that work when I have no graphics drivers loaded?! The Display Adapter still shows a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager, and it says there are no driver files loaded and it's not using any resources. So, surely it should be stuck in VGA mode, as it was before? Any thoughts? I can probably use it like this, although the refresh rate is an issue when scrolling or moving things around on the screen, but AFAIK it shouldn't be working at all with no driver! Cheers, Dave.

What a great idea @jaclaz! Certainly worth a try if all else fails, but @RainyShadow has prompted me about something. I had already looked up EMGD and seen it was something to do with Intel, which I thought was strange as I thought I'd purged the system of all Intel-related files and registry entries, which were from when the system drive was in my old netbook, which was an Intel-based machine. Of course I've now realised that the crashing tabs on the Display Properties window are in fact the tabs from the old Intel graphics driver. Why they are still there I have no idea, but I certainly intend to find out! They may well be nothing to do with the AMD driver crashing, but it's one more thing to eliminate. I already have Autoruns, so I will deploy that and see what it shows. Cheers, Dave.

This is what I'm seeing, nothing in the sidebar except the block of links that are normally at the bottom of it.

I'm afraid I didn't have any luck at all with the Display Driver Uninstaller utility. As soon as I told it to uninstall the driver it immediately crashed every time, both in normal mode and Safe Mode ("....has run into a problem and needs to close") and apparently it was a "system exception". The Windows Application event log is full of .NET 4 exception errors. I guess I could try with an even earlier version. I then tried with Driver Cleaner Pro anyway, which I already had a copy of. That seemed to be more successful, but I manually removed any residual files and registry entries anyway. Unfortunately commenting out the HKLM lines in the INF file doesn't do the trick. The crashing tabs are still there on the Display properties, and the driver still crashes when the machine is rebooted. I'll have a look trough the INF file and see what else i think can be taken out, hopefully just leaving the basic driver install.

On Firefox 74 on Windows 10, I've noticed that collapsing the sidebar no longer removes it completely, it now collapses to a row of icons. I guess that's the code change which has stopped it appearing completely in Firefox 52 ESR.

I downloaded version 18.0.0.4 of the utility, which is the last that works on XP, 18.0.0.5 and later versions need .NET 4.5 apparently. I'll let you know how it goes! Thinking of you all in Italy. We've only been in full lockdown here in the UK for six days. I guess it will be weeks before we know if it's working or not.

My sidebar with the list of my subscriptions has disappeared again from YouTube on Firefox 52.9 ESR. It's just showing the information links that are normally at the bottom of it, but nothing else.

Thanks @jaclaz. I have no normal uninstallation option for the driver, so do you think I can uninstall it using the INF file with the necessary command? The file has [Uninstall.CopyFiles] and [Uninstall.AddReg] sections, but no [DefaultUninstall] section. BTW I am horrified at the awful news coming from your country. I do hope you and yours are still OK.

Yes, I wonder if some pruning of the INF file might do the trick. I'm not interested in any of the "bells and whistles". As long as the driver will go into the mode I need, and is stable, that's all I'm hoping for. I've attached the INF file here in case anyone with more experience of customising these types of drivers has any suggestions. Thanks for any input. oem39.inf

Another update. I think I can now definitely say that the driver can work, if only at a basic level. If I boot into Safe Mode and disable the display adapter, when I then boot into normal mode and re-enable it, the driver loads and I can set higher resolutions (including 1366x786) without any problem. The display is good, although there is no acceleration. The display control panel still crashes if I try and use any of the tabs added by the AMD driver. However, that's usable as far as I'm concerned, at least it isn't stuck in VGA mode! It still won't survive a reboot though, it just blue screens again, and I have to then go into Safe Mode again and repeat the whole procedure. So, why will the driver apparently load OK when the machine is already up and running, but won't load when booting?

Apparently UBO 1.74 isn't being supported any more, whereas UBO 1.16 is, specifically for legacy browsers. See here and the subsequent posts. I use 1.16 now and it seems to work fine and auto-updates.

OK, I tried again this morning, with the same result, and then thought I would try another version of ati2dvag.dll, as that is the file apparently causing the problem. I found another version to download and substituted it. The original version is 6.14.10.7280, the substitute I found is 6.14.10.7279. Then it started OK, but with very bad resolution and colour depth, which could not be fixed. I then reverted to the original version, and to my great surprise it still started OK, and I could change the settings. I actually got it into 1024x768 with 32 bit colour! (My panel is actually 1366x768, but who cares!) Great, I thought, until I rebooted, at which point I just got the BSOD again. I've also noticed that the Advanced driver settings crash when I try to use them "Error Detected! Aborting. Please verify if EMGD is active." Still, I am heartened by this as I have seen that the driver can work! All I've got to do now is find out why it won't keep working!

OK, I gave it a try! I extracted the driver files, and added my device ID to the INF file. Running setup didn't offer the graphics driver, so I installed from the INF file. It installed the driver as "AMD Radeon HD 8240". I then rebooted and just got the following BSOD. I had to boot in Safe Mode to get back in, and the driver is still being offered, but presumably won't work again. It seemed to be so close too!

Thank you yet again @cdob! I will try that out and report back. Cheers, Dave.

It's been a while, but another glitch seems to have now appeared. I noticed a while ago that multiple images on IG posts were showing spurious ugly scroll bars on Firefox 52 ESR, but now most of them are just showing empty white boxes as well, with no content. Normal single image and video posts seem to be still fine.

Just one thing I'd like to ask about before I seriously start to see if a proper driver is possible here. I thought that if a graphics card had no drivers available, it would appear in Device Manager as "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter". My card is appearing under "Other devices" as "Video Controller (VGA Compatible)". This is fine as far as it goes, but it's prompting me to install a driver on every boot, which is really annoying! I've checked "Don't prompt me again to install this software" umpteen times, but it makes absolutely no difference. I've tried searching for "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" as a driver option, but it doesn't seem to exist. How can I make it default to that? I can't see any left-over third-party graphics driver files in the INF folder, but if I select to search the machine for drivers I just get a list of ancient incompatible ATI drivers, which are presumably the ones that come with Windows XP. Thanks for any suggestions, I just want to get rid of the constant driver installation nag! Cheers, Dave.

Oops, another "senior moment"! I completely forgot about that other thread, that's where I was pointed to VBEMP of course. Please do merge them @dencorso. I'm definitely losing it........... To answer your question, I didn't try modding the INF file in any of the other drivers, if that's what you mean. I've actually deleted them all now as I was just getting confused as to which was which. Do you have any recommendations as to a likely one to try? All the XP Catalyst packages I've seen seem to be much too old to work with an HD series graphics chip.

Sorry I should have said this in the first post! The hardware ID is PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9839. I had tried searching for that but didn't come up with anything. I had a look at that drp.su link, I doubt if there's anything there that will work on XP, and I'm very loathe anyway to use a site that makes you download their "driver installer" to get any drivers, which is almost certainly loaded with spyware at very least, and malware at worst!