Dave-H

I used SDIO to find the touchpad drivers, there were a huge number of options from many PC manufacturers, a huge package to download, and while I didn't try all of them as it would have taken many hours, I didn't find a single one that actually worked properly of the ones I did try. They all install, but none produce a usable control panel so you can't actually change any settings. Either the control panel is completely blank, or only a few settings are shown, none of which actually work. As far as I'm concerned, the touchpad is unusable unless the "tap to click" function can be disabled at very least. How people use them with that switched on is quite beyond me, the constant unintentional clicks drive me mad! I suspect the touchpad on my machine is designed only to work with Asus Smart Gesture, which has no version that will install on XP. I also found a lot of chipset drivers, but again, none of them will work. Most of them are 64 bit, as it's a 64 bit machine. None of the 32 bit versions have information about the hardware. As for the graphics driver, I don't think the option to uninstall/reinstall it on every boot will work either, quite apart from the fact that it will horribly slow down the process! I've done more experimenting, and if I disable the display adapter so I can boot into normal mode, and then enable it, it enables OK, but is still shown as being in 640x480 mode in the Display Properties. As soon as I change that it tries to change the resolution, and then BSODs. I can't imagine that the same thing wouldn't happen if it was being installed on every boot. Fundamentally, it's not communicating with the hardware properly, and even if it could be got to work as it should even the once, I suspect it would always be very unstable. No, I think the time has come to admit defeat here, and accept that some things just aren't possible with XP now.

Thanks, I will certainly checkout the touchpad driver. If I can get the touchpad working properly with full settings available (at the moment it's just a generic P/S2 mouse) that will greatly influence my decision as to whether to abandon XP on this machine or not! Cheers, Dave.

Yes, that report is an extremely similar scenario, although it does say that the driver will sometimes load without the BSOD. It never does for me! What a shame they presumably never found a fix! I did try starting in different resolutions, but anything other than starting in VGA mode from the F8 menu (or Safe Mode of course) causes the crash. I think at a very fundamental level, the driver is going into an endless loop when it tries to initialise the hardware. It does usually work OK on very first installation after being removed, and as long as a restart isn't required, I can then change the settings without the crash, but as soon as I reboot, no joy.

Thanks @jaclaz. Yes, I could just try it with the VGASAVE driver for a while and see how it goes, although I'm sure I will find the slow refresh rate (even with acceleration level 5) vary annoying! Still, as you say I'm only using it as a secondary OS really just for diagnostic purposes on Windows 8.1, so maybe it won't matter. Does "Qres" provide the same functionality as "MultiRes"? They look very similar. I already use "MultiMonitorTool" on my desktop, it's a great program, as all of Nir Sofer's are of course! His "SetDisplay" tool seems to be another resolution switcher. I don't actually need anything like that with the VGASAVE driver as I appear to be able to set the resolution levels using the normal Display Properties window.

The processor is an AMD A4-1200 APU, with 4GB of RAM. It's actually a 64 bit machine, but I'm only intending to install 32 bit operating systems on it. I can't see any great advantage in using a 64 bit OS as the memory can't be physically increased as it's part of the motherboard, not a plugin card. Thanks for the offer, but I'm really not that wedded to having to have XP on this machine, certainly not in a virtual machine. I don't see any point, the only advantage would be to have another XP system to compare with the XP system on my desktop which can help diagnostics it something goes wrong. Otherwise, it doesn't really matter what the second OS is, although I will stick with Windows.

That does sound rather a big undertaking, with of course absolutely no guarantee that it will be any different. If the driver cannot communicate properly with the hardware at a fundamental level, as seems to be the case, I really don't think it will help. I'm starting to think the unthinkable here now. I only want to dual boot the netbook because I like having dual boot systems, so I might as well dual boot Windows 7 with Windows 8.1. Don't worry, I wouldn't be abandoning XP completely, I still use it as my main OS on my desktop machine! I just think that struggling to get XP working when there's no real reason other that nostalgia for it to be XP, is pointless. I also can't find a driver that works for the touchpad, which is driving me mad because I can't disable the "tap to click" function. I've tried a few drivers, but even those that apparently install OK there are no settings available in the interfaces, they're all greyed out. I think maybe the time has come this time to say this is never going to work properly, so let's look at alternatives.

Just to now confirm, "carousel" still images still display, just with spurious ugly scroll bars. Carousel videos also have the scroll bars, and also just display white boxes.

OK, I tried MultiRes, but unfortunately I can only boot into the Safe Modes or VGA mode. Everything else BSODs. Safe Mode is using the Windows VGASAVE driver, VGA Mode claims to be using the ATI driver. However in VGA mode if I try to select any higher resolutions with MultiRes, it just says they "cannot be supported".

Ah thanks, scrap that theory then! That makes it even more strange if that is an official AMD driver, claiming to support the HD8180 under XP, which actually doesn't work! I'm now wondering if my hardware is different somehow to what the driver was designed for, which would explain everything.

I haven't checked MultiRes, but I'll certainly give it a try! When I boot into VGA mode using the F8 menu, I get an error on boot saying that Catalyst Control Center doesn't support the driver I'm using, and that happens if I try to run it after boot as well, saying it doesn't support the currently active GPU. Device Manager and Display Properties both say I'm using the Radeon HD 8180 driver. I'm wondering if this is actually a hacked Chinese driver, which still doesn't actually work on some hardware, including mine! Incidentally, the driver files are now version 6.14.10.7280, which I'm pretty certain is the same as the driver I was using before.

Oh dear, what a bummer! I was so hopeful that driver would work too, although I note that the Chinese download page does not mention the HD8180. I tried doing a complete clean again, and then another install, which again went perfectly until the reboot, at which the 0xEA BSOD came back again. Time to give up do we think? I guess there really is no XP compatible driver which will talk to my hardware without crashing. As AFAIK there is no hope whatsoever of getting a Vista or later driver working on XP, I guess that's game over.

No problem, just thought I should mention it in case it throws anyone else! Thanks again, Dave.

Well I tried the driver from the Chinese site, and everything looked very hopeful. For the first time, the Catalyst Install Manager offered me the graphics driver and the Catalyst Control Center. It appeared to install fine with no modifications to anything, no error messages. I was hoping for the best, but on reboot back came the BSOD! I'm wondering if there was something still left over from the previous installation, although i thought I'd cleaned everything with Driver Cleaner Pro. I will check and try again.

Thank you, it has! It's a uBlock filter BTW, not a rule, which confused me for a while. Cheers, Dave.

I just changed my YouTube user agent string on Firefox 52.9 ESR to - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome72.0.3626.121 Safari/537.36 The sidebar information has come back, but I'm now getting the "browser will soon be unsupported" nag at the top of the frame. Anyone got a good string that might get rid of the latter but keep the former?!

Wow, how do you find this stuff! Thanks a million guys. I will try that driver, as it does indeed seem to contain my hardware ID. I hope it hasn't been modded for that, it doesn't look as if it has been. @RainyShadow Yes, it will boot happily in VGA mode from the F8 menu and then works fine. However if I then try to raise the resolution level using the normal interface, it tries to refresh and then blue screens. I will certainly try Multires if the new driver that's been found by @win32 doesn't work any better than what I've already got. Cheers, and thanks all for sticking with this!

The PCI Bus Device ID is "ACPI\PNP0A08". I can't find any specifically ATI/AMD drivers for it. What driver file or files would you expect it to be using? At the moment it's just using the standard Microsoft version of "PCI.SYS". There is a "chipset.msi" file in the driver package I'm using, but it won't install, it just says "This installation package could not be opened. Contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer package." After more experimenting, it seems that the driver is crashing when it's trying to apply settings to the driver, which is possibly why it works in VGA mode as that is the default mode so there is nothing to apply. That would seem to be why trying to change any settings when the driver is running also causes the crash.

@RainyShadow Yes, I guess the three monitors are the built-in display panel, the HDMI connection, and the external VGA connection. The latter two are not actually connected to anything of course. On Windows 8.1 the display driver is listed under "PCI Express Root Complex". Only one "Generic PnP Monitor" is listed as being connected to it.

I already removed all the duplicated devices in Safe Mode, and when I restarted again it put them back, exactly as they were before! I also had to reactivate Windows, as it thought the hardware had changed so much!

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!