Dear Thinkpad users. After many failures and zero support from official resources, this is a comprehensive, unbiased installation procedure for the official ATI driver with Catalyst Control Center for Radeon X1300, X1400, V5200 graphic cards on Windows 8.1. In my experience, the latest driver for these cards written for Windows Vista 32-/64-bit works flawlessly on Windows 8.1 and you will benefit from multi-monitor support, full HW-acceleration and the PowerPlay option in Catalyst Control Center as well. Install only the official ATI driver, no other modification required. (The installation may work also on non-Thinkpad systems, such as Dell etc. but I have not tested it on that systems)
Installation procedure:
1. Before installation, ensure you are logged as an administrator
2. Go to ‘Control Panel’ -> ‘Power Options’ and click on ‘Choose what the power buttons do’ option from the list on the left side of the window
3. Go to ‘Shut-down settings’ on the bottom and disable ‘Turn on fast start-up (recommended)’. Unchecking that checkbox is very important because it will prevent the problem with start-up black screen on the computer.
4. Go to ‘Control Panel’ again and choose ‘Programs and Features’, then click on ‘Turn Windows features on or off’
5. Select the checkbox ‘.NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0) to turn it on and wait until the installation is completed
6. Go to Windows update and install all important updates including those for ‘.NET Framework 3.5 as well
7. Download ATI video driver from the website of your hardware vendor. For Lenovo Thinkpad T60, T60p users the latest ATI video driver is for Windows Vista (32-bit, 64-bit), please visit http://support.lenovo.com/ca/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/thinkpad-t-series-laptops/thinkpad-t60... and download the driver
8. Once you have the driver downloaded right-click on the file and choose ‘Properties’ from the drop-down menu.
9. Click on ‘Compatibility’ card then ‘Change settings for all users’ and check in the checkbox at ‘Compatibility mode’ with the option for Windows Vista as well as at ‘Run this program as an administrator’
10. Double left-click and install the program.
11. Go to the location ‘C:\drivers\WIN\VIDEO and open the file ‘Bin’ (for Windows 8.1 32-bit users) or ‘Bin64’ (for Windows 8.1 64-bit users)
12. Right click on ‘Setup’ file; choose ‘Properties’ from the drop-down menu and repeat the step 9
13. Once you have set the properties, double left-click on that file and install the driver
14. Follow the installation instructions and finish the installation
15. Restart the computer
cheers
