Windows 10 and AMD Radeon HD4850
Someday I installed Windows 10 on my work PC. Well I did it after I installed Win10 on my home PC and have been living on it for a while. As I didn’t encounter anything terrible wrong I decided to migrate my work PC also. But not everything was great in this process.
The first issue I encountered was one with video adapter. I have Radeon HD4850 on that machine. After Windows rebooted to complete installing I got Microsoft Basic Adapter in Device manager and lost multiple monitors support. Basic Adapter doesn’t support multiple monitors (why, Microsoft?) and just shows the same picture on all of them. It’s funny to have stereo picture on both monitors indeed but actually it’s a disaster. Updating drivers via Device manager didn’t work so I went to AMD site to download a new driver. But it turned out that AMD decided to not support 4000 Radeon series in Windows 10 at all. Just no drivers. “Nobody makes you to upgrade to Windows 10”, they say. Nice shot AMD.
Here’s an example of a thread which AMD forums full of — https://community.amd.com/message/2660992.
It’s a nice answer: “The 4xxx series cards are not supported on Windows 10 as they do not meet the minimum requirements”. Ridiculous! I’m not going to play in Doom I just want to have two desktops.
Here’s Windows 10 requirements:
Graphics card:
DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
What the hell AMD?!
So the first conclusion for this day: do not buy AMD video cards anymore. Ever. Just don’t.
When I was close to despair I decided to try integrated video card on my motherboard and rebooted to go into BIOS. In BIOS there is a switch for “active video” with options: Auto (was enabled), PCI, PCI-E, Internal:
I choose “Internal” (IGD) and rebooted. But I forgot to switch vga/dvi cables and decided to wait to see what will happen. To my surprise nothing changed — both monitors were still attached to my HD4850 (which is on PCI-E obviously) worked as before. I logged into Windows, went to Device manager and tried to update driver for “Microsoft Basic Adapter”. And it was a miracle! Windows started to download a new driver and installed “ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series”.
After the new driver was installed multiple monitor support works as it should.
Magic.
