HELP! Can't install new drivers! Big Problem!

[pistol654]

I tried to install one of the leaked drivers for my Radeon 8500 because I wasn't achieving the performance that I wanted with the official drivers, and that's when all the trouble happened. Actually, every unofficial driver I have ever tried to install did not install correctly, but this time I am unable to install my old official driver correctly.
I think I know where I made my mistake though. I found a guide for installing new ATI drivers and it included going into the registry to delete some things that are left after unistalling a driver. Basically, it's a guide to perform a clean installation, so it said.

Well, when I restarted after installing the unofficial driver, I got a message saying "the display device that correctly displays items on the screen is not functioning properly, install a new display driver."

The problem is that when I installed the new official driver from ATI, I couldn't adjust a number of things such as the refresh rate and the resolution. This is after an error message during startup after the new driver installation.
So I uninstalled the driver and continued to use the default VGA device. I even tried to do fresh install with the drivers that came with the CD for the Radeon, but that resulted in something even worse. Windows would load and as soon as it would finish loading, the screen would turn completely black except for a cursur in the top left corner. My only option was to reboot into safe mode and perform system restore. Even after performing system restore however, it failed to load my old display drivers, even though they are still on the computer in a folder.
So, could someone PLEASE help me?? I've been working on this for about a day now and I'm out of options. Please help. Thanks in advance.

[D@ve]

Try starting the computer up in safe mode and removing the graphics card from the device manager list and then restart the computer, when it starts up again in normally it will re-detect the card if it asks you to reboot select no and install the ne driver. Hope this helps!

[Lycia]

Sounds like the driver is trying to set a refresh rate that monitor is choking on. Don't get me wrong, under normal cricumstances the monitor will probably be able to handle it..

What you should do is, install the standard VGA driver, go into safe mode, and desktop to 640x480 and the refresh to 60mhz. reboot the machine, then install the drivers..ATI cards tend to be freaky when it comes to other drivers nnot released by ATI. And besides, going from 168 fps in a game to say 179 is not going to make that much difference, so why bother with the leaked unofficial drivers?

[pistol654]

Hey Lycia,

I've realized that unofficial drivers are not worth fooling around with now. I'm gonna try what you suggested and see whether that fix's my problem. Too bad ATI drivers are so finicky, but I guess that's what you get when your dealing with unofficial drivers. Thanks.