I am trying to solve a problem with an old 90s ATI TV Wonder USB1
Edition on a 97 Dell Latitude. I will concede that I should use a new
laptop and TV turner, but I have this stuff laying around and the
Latitude is very reliable, uses very little power, makes no noise,
and I only want to use it to run three simple USB devices two of
which it runs just fine. A Magic Jack VOIP USB device, a news, and
weather feed transmitter that sends a wireless signal to a remote
display, and a ATI TV Wonder USB Edition device to monitor scanning
security cameras.
The Dell Latitude is a 233MMX with 128 megs of RAM, and a modern 30GB
5400 RPM Fujitsu hard drive. I have a Belkin wireless N NIC in one
PMCIA slot and a Rosewill 4 port USB2 PMCIA card in the other slot.
Up to now I have been using the Latitude with Win2K to only run the
ATI TV Wonder USB Edition and scan the security cameras. The ATI was
a late 90s TV turner and like all ATI TV devices has always been a
pain to get working. I had it working on the Latitude to scan the
cameras in 2k but it if I tried to record it would blue screen. I
didn't really need it to record, just scan so I didn't peruse a solution.
The minimum requirements for the ATI are a 233MMX, 32 megs of ram and
DirectX 8, OS running 98, 2k and with the latest 2002 drivers XP, all
of which are more then met by the Latitude. But I now need to run XP
to support the Magic Jack. Before I used the Latitude for this I had
the ATI running from a USB1 port in a old Thinkpad running XP and
while it was a huge effort to get it working properly the ATI did run
and record in XP. So I know for a fact ATI works with the Latitude
hardware in 2K, and I also know the ATI will run in XP. .. at least
on the Thinkpad..BTW the T23 Thinkpad fan went out and burned up the
CPU and chipset years ago which is why I am not using it for this.
When I decided to make the Latitude more useful by plugging in the
Magic Jack and the news feeder I discovered that the minimum
requirements to run those devices required XP. I installed XP PRO
OEM to the Dell Latitude and then tweaked it for maximum performance.
Turning off the eye candy, system restore, running in classic mode,
fixed swap file size, video colors at 16 million, and using the 54K
hard drive resulted in an acceptable, if not nimble, machine which
easily handles the Magic Jack, and the news feed transmitter that are
plugged into the USB2 PMCIA card.
The problem, of course, is with the ATI TV Wonder USB Edition. I
knew I would have a struggle so before I even attempted to install
the ATI I imaged the drive. ATI instructions say that before you can
install new drivers you must completely remove old drivers. So
almost every time I tried a new install of the ATI I would re-image
the hard drive so I stared with a clean slate.
I installed the ATI as the Administrator, following the instructions
for XP, line by line. And it doesn't load. I get a common ATI error
message when I try to run it =
The TV player failed to initialize the video
There is no other software installed other then the OS, Nor is there
a device that is installed or conflicting. I do not have the Magic
Jack or the feeder installed at the moment. There is nothing
problematic or difficult to work with on a old Latitude, but I do see
one odd and wrong thing in Device manager. The ATI is correctly
installed under Sound, Video and Game Controllers but also appears
in Imaging Devices, and shows up in Windows Explorer as a camera! I
have both tried uninstalling ... it comes back on reboot, and
disabling it, but doing so did not solve the problem.
I have gone back to this problem many times in the last week, I have
re-imaged and reinstalled multiple times in slightly different ways
many times. I have tried it from every available USB port including
the single USB 1 port on board the Latitude. I have tried using an
external power supply to the PMCIA USB2 card. If I could just go buy
an old TV turner that was supported by a 233MMX I would do it.
I am out of ideas. It should work, there is no good reason why it
isn't working, but it doesn't work. I am hoping that the collectives
vast experience and knowledge battling old PC artifacts, in antique
operating systems, will find a way to make this SOB work for me. Any
body have any ideas?
