Does anyone know if it would be possible to install a radeon 7500 in an inspiron 4100? I suspect it would fit physically, I'm just not sure how the video BIOS and the regular BIOS interact. If it is a unified BIOS, perhaps the video BIOS could be extracted from the i8100 BIOS and added to the i4100 BIOS to replace the ATi M6 BIOS. Any thoughts?
Well, I got the card today. I installed it and it powered up with no video. I connected an external monitor and tried again. No video.
I unplugged the LCD and used the external monitor. No video. I docked and connected to the vga port in the dock.. No video
I put an old Virge DX card in my dock and was able to get a display on the Virge DX card. I went into the BIOS and saw this
Video : DISABLED
Video Memory: DISABLED
I allowed it to boot into Windows XP and the virge card came up. I had another monitor on the dock video port and nothing came up.
The add new hardware wizard said it found the Mobility Radeon 7500 (6292). I rebooted and there is an (!) next to the card. The error is This device cannot start. (Code 10)
Click Troubleshoot to start the troubleshooter for this device.
Under the resource tab, it says "This device isn't using any resources because it has a problem"
I am about 99% sure that it is a video bios problem. Since there does not appear to be any flash chips on the card itself.
I can only ask for suggestions at this point. One idea I had is to use the radeon flash utility and have someone make a dump of their Radeon 7500 bios (from a c640 or 4150) and see if I can use the dos program vgabios to load it into memory and see if the card comes up.