How to install Catalyst-legacy driver in Windows 8.1? ATI Radeon 4000 Series and earlier.

Welcome Ideabusters!

This time, after a long time, a legit and full fledged article is posted here,
now, I understand a lot of you might be in utter desperation, so i’ll save you the time and tell you how I did it.

Firstly, I did all this to play Minecraft. On windows 8.1.
Let me tell you my basic and relevant to this case specs:
GPU: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650
… that’s all that’s needed actually, you don’t need the CPU, RAM, HDD, etc.

How I encountered the problem?
I was just done installing Windows 8.1 and was installing stuff I backed up, and then I started installing minecraft. Went smooth as anything the installation did. But when I began to play it, it didn’t run! It CRASHED! Now here is a list of things I found out from the crash report, I googled and I found out through all the means I could:

And the last search gave me relief.

What happened is, on windows 8.1, there is no support for legacy ATI cards. So what I had to do it, manually install the driver from Device manager.

Won’t go into details about what I did if not asked for. So if you’ve tried everything and still nothing helps, try googling the things I googled, or read on, this will probably fix it for you.

The following text article is from Microsoft Answers, here.

– Install all components of the driver normally (Catalyst Control Center etc.)
-> The graphics driver itself will fail – you need to install it manually using the Device Manager!

– Open the Device Manager (right click on Start-Icon in left corner), go to “Graphics Card”
– Right click on the card and select “Update driver…” from the context menu (first entry)
– Click on “Search for a driver on the computer” (second entry)
– Click “Select driver from list”
– Click on the “Device…” button in the right corner
– Select the driver file (*.inf) from the extracted ATI folder. In my case, this was C:AMDSupport13-1-legacy_vista_win7_win8_64_dd_cccPackagesDriversDisplayW86A_INF.
There are a few different files, it seems the dialog will choose the right one if you simple select one of them… TRY IT FIRST! Otherwise you could try to read the .inf files (they are just plain text files – maybe you’ll find your chipset in there…
– Click on OK, the dialog will now show one or two entries, which should have the name of your graphics card – select one of them
– Click on Next – the screen(s) will go black and flicker, you will hear the device connection/disconnection sounds several times. Don’t worry, everythings works as intended! 🙂
– The driver should now be ready – restart your system, and you should now be able to control your graphics settings using the Catalyst Control Center.

– Tip: Save this trick somewhere, it will save you lots of headaches the next time you need to install windows! I figured it out painfully at least twice! 🙂

I hope this helped you, it sure did help me! Good day gents! 😀 Be sure to comment and provide feedback for others and myself!