X31, X32 & 2877 Dock & PCI graphics in Win 7

[ThinkDan]

Hi all,

Forgive me, I've seen posts relating to this recently but my search mojo is broken today.

I have the above two machines, plus a shared dock with PCI slot. Bought a new monitor and wanted to use DVI for clarity; I want to use the monitor as my primary display when the laptop is docked. DVI out on the Dock is not supported for X-series, so popped in a PCI video card. All worked in XP of course, after a driver download, but no joy in Win 7.

Learnt very quickly about XPDM and WDDM, and that the two won't mix. The ATI Mobility is supported under Win 7 via Omega 6.x drivers, i.e. XPDM. My strategy was therefore to find the most powerful PCI card with DVI out that had XPDM so I could run both cards at 'downlevel' 6.x driver versions.

Also realised to my dismay that hardware profiles were consigned to history with Vista I like that I can set XP to boot with the 9250/monitor as primary display when docked, Mobility/LCD as primary when undocked.

Started swapping cards and drivers in and out; am now on an ATI Radeon 9250. Omega drivers installed in XP.

Had to put experimenting on hold due to major writing commitment, but will have time to tinker shortly. What I really need to know first is: has anyone else got this set-up working, or am I flogging a dead horse?

If it's workable, any suggestions for working around absence of hardware profiles for changing the primary display based on docking status?

Thanks

[jronald]

Are you familiar with Star Trek?
Once upon a time Lenard McCoy looked at James T Kirk (Captain) and stated matter of factly, "Jim it's dead"

I have heard of people getting it to work, but its hit or miss, and I have never been able to replicate it. Its the GPU that seems to cause the issue, just too old for support.

YMMV
Ron

[ganon11000]

You can get nvidia 6XXX cards in PCI, AGP & PCI-E and all support WDDM in windows 7 & 8!