I just repaved Wyoh with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, since I wanted a 64-bit OS and there’s no fucking way I’m running Vista on my primary dev laptop. I’ve been running XP x64 at work for a while, but my work box has shit on-board graphics so I never had to seek out the latest ATI drivers for a 64-bit XP install. Wyoh on the other hand has an embedded Radeon Mobility X1800 graphics board that really needs ATI’s latest drivers.

Apparently the OEMs that license the Mobility Radeon chips don’t like ATI providing the latest and greatest Catalyst bits online, since dumb users could download them before the OEMs have a chance to verify them, thus marring the user experience and (more importantly) costing said OEM a support call. Lame!

Fortunately, there’s a workaround.

I awoke this morning to find that the extended display (UltraSharp FP20) connected to my laptop’s DVI port was showing its contents in grayscale. I checked the DVI connection, power-cycled the display, and nothing helped. I then rebooted Windows, and during the boot process the Windows splash screen displayed correctly in color, but once I logged in to my desktop the extended display went back to grayscale.