ATI Catalyst Control Center and Windows 7 64-bit

[parkcarshere]

I've been having this issue with multiple versions of Windows 7 (beta, RC, and now retail), so I'm wondering what the issue could be. I did a search for this but didn't find anything - if there is a thread, please close this and direct me to the right place!

Anyways, I have a Radeon HD 4850 and am using Windows 7 Home 64-bit. I have been trying to install the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) for quite some time now, but it always ends in the same result - a blue screen. I've downloaded several different versions since the public release of Windows 7 (tried about 5 driver versions) and each has been an equal failure. The only way I update my driver is by extracting the files from the CCC downloader and updating them via the device manager which works fine.

The CCC isn't necessary, but I don't understand why it doesn't work. Anyone have any ideas, or is it just busted for 64-bit Windows 7?

As a reference:

I'm downloading drivers from here and my video card is this.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

 

[Gandalf]

1. Antivirus programs can interfere with installing drivers.

2. Download/install/run http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
It's free and it can clean your temp folders. Failed installations can leave behind temp files that can interfere with subsequent installation attempts.

3. Download/install/run http://www.phyxion.net/
Driver Sweeper will remove old versions of drivers prior to installing new drivers.
It should be run from the Safe mode (F8).

 

[parkcarshere]

Thanks for the tips Gandalf.

1) I don't have an antivirus program on this computer, and programs like Windows Defender and other Windows security programs are not enabled.

2) I use CCleaner almost daily!

3) I ran that Driver Sweeper (in safe mode) after these blue screens occurred the first few times to no avail. I will certainly try it again since I forgot to do it this time, but I don't have much faith that it will work this time. We'll see!

Any other ideas out there?

 

[Gandalf]

Not having an AntiVirus program installed is just asking for trouble.
Your problem could very easily be caused by a bug.

 

[parkcarshere]

I understand the risks. However, I only use this computer for media and gaming and therefore run an extremely small risk of getting a virus. On the computers where I am more active on the internet, I have an antivirus program .

I agree that this could be a bug. Do you mean a bug in the drivers or in something else? I doubt it could be the drivers because I've tried several different versions over the past few months, and each time I have to manually "update" the drivers without installing the CCC.

 

[Gandalf]

I have a 64bit system and I use W7 Ultimate in it.
I'm not sure that driver manufacturers put that much effort in testing their 64bit software before putting it out for public consumption.

If I were you, I'd run an AV test if for no other reason than to eliminate it as a reason for your problems.

 

[parkcarshere]

Thanks again for the help Gandalf.

I took your advice and installed my AV on this computer, updated it, and ran a full system scan in safe mode. Nothing was found. I also ran Ad-Aware after this scan and came up empty.

Any other ideas anyone? It's not a huge issue, but it's difficult to install the drivers and fully manage my video card without installing them the "easy" way.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

i had the same issue with a dell optiplex 960 running w7 ultimate 64 bit.had to also install drivers thru device manager.it was a hd4650.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

I swithced to a nvidia gt240 and had no issues!

 

[Guest]

Same problem here. Dell Optiplex 760 and Windows 7 64bit. On installing CCC (latest update) -> blue screen.
In my case I really need the Catalyst Control Center... The pc serves as a htpc and is connected to a Philips series 5000 lcd tv.
The screen turnes green for a few seconds after 15 minutes 😱 It's a known issue with the ATI hd4550 and Philips lcd's of this series.
To correct this the pixel format needs to be changed... and the only place to do this is in... CCC
Running on Vista now... no problems. If anyone knows a fix

 

[parkcarshere]

While I did not ever find a solution to this issue (I continue just to live with this problem), I did contact ATI support and they were, as expected, mostly useless. However, in hopes of helping someone, I will post the responses from them.

Response 1:

Dear Customer,

Your service request : SR #{ticketno:[8200313564]} has been reviewed and updated.

Response and Service Request History:

The issue you are describing might be due to improper installation of ATI Drivers and software. Please follow the bellow instructions to solve your problem.

1. Uninstall the current ATI Display Driver and Catalyst Control Center version from the System
a. If you are using Windows XP go to the add remove programs in the Windows Control Panel
b. If you are using Windows 7/Vista: Use the Catalyst Install Manager (CIM) via Programs and Features to perform an express recommended uninstall for users.
c. Restart the system when prompted.
2. Remove all versions of Microsoft .Net Frameworks
a. Use the Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features in the Windows Control Panel.
b. If unable to remove all items, refer to the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility for more information:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301

3. Install all windows updates

4. Install all Motherboard Drivers/updates including BIOS drivers.

5. Install Catalyst 10.5 please refer to the following links

a. For Microsoft Windows XP: ATI Catalyst Suite Driver Installation Instructions under Windows XP or Windows 2000
b. For Microsoft Windows Vista® and 7: ATI Catalyst Suite Driver Installation Instructions under Windows Vista
In order to update this service request, please respond, leaving the service request reference intact.

Best regards,

AMD Global Customer Care

After I told them I tried all of the above steps, they then asked me to send the usual information (DXDiag, computer specs, etc), which lead to this response.

Response 2:

Dear Customer,

Your service request : SR #{ticketno:[8200313564]} has been reviewed and updated.

Response and Service Request History:

Has a manual install be tried?...this can be accomplished by browsing to the driver location on the harddriver and pointing the windows install to the driver files that were extracted to the harddrive of the PC.

In order to update this service request, please respond, leaving the service request reference intact.

Best regards,

AMD Global Customer Care

Yes... a manual install was tried, as indicated to them on two different occasions. This response lead to the CSR giving up with this response.

Response 3:

Dear Customer,

Your service request : SR #{ticketno:[8200313564]} has been reviewed and updated.

Response and Service Request History:

Manually installing the driver is the only other way to install drivers on a PC...besides the most conventional way of downloading a file and running it. Manually installing a driver is not a "bandaid" so to speak...it is just another way of doing the samething...just like either walking to the store or taking the car...one will take longer...one is shorter....but eventually you do get to the store.

Driver install issue are quite common...more are more difficult to resolve than most because not everyone has the same type of setup.

Based on the message you got...is seems that windows cannot read from were the driver extracted to...maybe removing the folder and re-extracting it might work. Other than that...maybe using 10.4 in the mean time until the next driver release comes out, is the next senario to try.

In order to update this service request, please respond, leaving the service request reference intact.

Best regards,

AMD Global Customer Care

So, end result: I redid all of the steps in order to reach the same conclusion - ATI doesn't have any clue how to program these drivers. My only solution thus far has been manually installing the drivers using Device Manager. HOWEVER, this "solution" stopped working after driver 10.3. Anything above that will cause a blue screen of death. I have tried 10.4 and 10.5 but these have not worked either. I've pretty much given up trying, and as soon as I can afford it I plan on getting rid of this card and moving back to nVidia.

Hopefully this helps someone. I'm still tracking this thread, so if anyone does happen to have any ideas, please let us know!

 

[mindless728]

wow...giving up so earlier, have you tried a fresh install of windows (i know, not preferable) to make sure it isn't something in the system causing the issue, as i have been installing all of the drivers as they have been coming out since i bought my 4870 (April 2009) i don't think it is the drivers

and i know that this isn't busted for Win 7 x64 (as i have been using it since the Beta) and the cards i am running aren't that different (4870 1GB)

 

[parkcarshere]

Yes, I have tried several fresh installs of Windows, including different versions (all 64-bit, though). I was lucky enough to have access to the Beta, Home Premium, Professional, AND Ultimate versions of Windows which have all been installed on this PC at one point or another, and neither version provided me with any luck.

Granted, I've been using my current version, Home Premium 64-bit, for about three months now, but neither version worked any better for me.

Edit: I would like to state that I am not "giving up early." I have been at this problem for many, many months now (as you can see, I made this post in May of this year, and I had been having this issue for much longer than that). I have simply decided that, after dealing with different online resources and even ATI customer support, I will simply live with the issue until I am able to replace the card.

 

[mindless728]

well that is interesting, and i did notice that this was originally from may (btw, this issue does suck to have)

and there really is no explanation for this not installing correctly after a fresh install

 

[tcplotts]

Yes, I have tried several fresh installs of Windows, including different versions (all 64-bit, though). I was lucky enough to have access to the Beta, Home Premium, Professional, AND Ultimate versions of Windows which have all been installed on this PC at one point or another, and neither version provided me with any luck.

Granted, I've been using my current version, Home Premium 64-bit, for about three months now, but neither version worked any better for me.

Edit: I would like to state that I am not "giving up early." I have been at this problem for many, many months now (as you can see, I made this post in May of this year, and I had been having this issue for much longer than that). I have simply decided that, after dealing with different online resources and even ATI customer support, I will simply live with the issue until I am able to replace the card.

Dude, for what it's worth, I've had this problem since Nov of 2010. I was reading your response from ATI customer service and the line "has a manual install be tried..." cracked me up. Outsourcing hi tech work to drunken circus monkeys leads to no one having any clue as to what's going on. Microsoft's even worse. Always the same, useless stupid spam: check your drivers! relentlessly.
Sadly, competent people are not hired for customer service/residential tech support anymore and haven't been for years. Okay, end rant, sorry.

I have an HD5450 that came with this crap ASUS rig out of the box with a bloated pre-load of Win 7 64-bit. Much changed in the industry between my previous rig and this one, the most obvious being the end of providing the customer with proper system disks, which turned out to be the curse of my machine regarding the CCC problem you are having. On a crap OS load, with a weak, corrupt or nonexistent partition (amazingly, this actually happens quite often in the assembly process! QA is dead! hee hee), the system disks you're forced to make often--but not always--replicate data corruption from the OS install. Shared files (.dlls) are very susceptible to this problem and it takes significant skill to hunt the specific error down.

Long rant/story short: corrupt shared .dlls were killing my system by clashing with every media/graphics program that shared them, and CCC uses several core shared files. Mine were corrupt, and that was the source of my Catalyst crashes. AMD can't patch this reliably precisely because of the shared core .dlls, so the only option is to do a good OS install. If this was happening to you out of the box, chances are your files are bad and your OS disk copies have a good chance of being bad as well.

My solution is to do a clean install of a *pure* win 7 OS (O wound up having to buy the whole frigging OS from Microsoft directly) but making sure you create a clean driver disk with all your basic manufacturing drivers as well (especially BIOS drivers) and starting over. I haven't done it with this crap rig, but had to do the same operation with my laptop. It was the only solution to constant blue screens from graphics software problems that I have ever found. It's expensive, too.

Good luck.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I have win7 ultimate x64 using a MSI HD4850 and have had no problems at all with any CCC version. I can't seem to find the information now, but i remember reading that the CCC has hidden command line optiions for the installer. One of them forces a complete uninstall of all ATI drivers before installing the new ones. This is not the same as the option that you can check off in the installer as it doesn't do a complete uninstall first. I don't know if this would help you considering that you used CCleaner with no luck, but it's worth a shot if you can find what those command line options are.

 

[mergatroid]

I have never had a single day of problems with the Radeon drivers until now. A few weeks ago Windows 7 updated my video card drivers and that's when all my problems started. It caused problems with Skyrim, so I went back to the previous version. When I did this, my system blanked the screen (windows bleep), it came back (bleep), went blank (bleep) and stayed blank, it never bleeped the fourth time and brought back the video like it's supposed to. I could tell the desktop was still running, but I could not return to it. I hit reset and let the system load and everything seemed to be working.

This week, I noticed there was a new driver again, so I used the update driver option in ccc like I have always done. It got an error during the video card driver portion of the install. When it was done I checked the version of the driver and it was not updated. I should have installed it manually, but I wanted it to work properly (rriight...) so I used a driver uninstaller (driver cleaner pro.net), and tried again. Now I'm back to the first problem where I get the two screen blanks and cannot get back to the desktop, except this time when I press reset ccc is not installed. I have two HD6970 cards in Crossfire x and I NEED CCC to work. (I'm pretty P.O.d over this considering how much money my system cost). So, I installed the driver manually and that worked, but no CCC which I need to control the overscan on one monitor and to turn the Crossfirex on and off.

I don't want to uninstall and reinstall Windows 7 pro 64 because I've only had it for a year and I've already had to reinstall it about four times. (twice because of system upgrades, twice because of Windows problems).

This is not virus or spyware related.

I have uninstalled all the .net framework and reinstalled it allowing all the updates and still I cannot install CCC.

For the smarta$$es out there, I moved to Radeon because I used to have problems with Nvidia drivers. And, no I'm not going to sell my $800 worth of cards and purchase Nvidia just to satisfy you.

If I do manage to find a solution without reinstalling Windows 7 again I will post it here.

Edit

I just did it all again. Uninstall drivers, uninstall .net, run driver cleaner, reboot into windows, install ccc (didn't work), reboot, install driver manually (worked), install ccc again (didn't work), reboot and ccc is now in my system tray but it will not show up in my "right click menu" like it used to. So, although it looks like it's installed, it's not perfect. I suppose it's usable like this, but I assume I'm going to have the same problem next time I update the driver.

I really think that between two companies that make SO MUCH MONEY that they could afford, between them, to fix this issue. I don't care what DLLs are shared, I'm not concerning myself with the technical details since that's their job, not mine. But I have to ask, if a new driver requires .net and shared DLLs and all that garbage, then why is that not included with the driver and reinstalled during the driver install? Don't even mention licenses and copy rights and patents and files that are in use because as a consumer I don't care. The fact is that both of these companies make far more than enough money to sort these things out and that's their job. This is not a hardware issue either. I have actually had to reinstall Windows 7 three times in a row because every time I installed it I got a different result. How is that even possible? How does that expression go, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Whoever said that has never tried installing Windows.

 

[nikorr]

This topic has been closed by Nikorr.