So I finally pulled the trigger and picked up the Dell 2005FPW. That’s right, the UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor and man is this sucker pretty. I’ve had the 1702FP for several years and have loved it and I’m sure the 2005FPW will treat me just as well. I almost want to get a second one…

In any case, it’s functionality on my primary system was going to be something of a question mark as I run Windows Server 2003 for my desktop (I don’t do much gaming…) and I have an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. Well ATI doesn’t officially release or support their cards on Server operating systems, but their XP versions generally install OK.

I snagged the latest ATI Catalyst drivers and installed them, but when I rebooted I got an error message about the ATI Control Panel:

The ATI Control Panel failed to initialize because no ATI driver is installed, or ATI driver is not working properly.

Great…that’s not too cool.

A quick Google led me to this forum post with very detailed instructions on how to install Catalyst drivers on Server 2003. However, there were only two things that I needed to do from those instructions to make the control panel work:

<li>Add the two *_XP.REG files in C:\ATI\SUPPORT\5-5_xp-2k_dd_cp_wdm\CPanel to the registry.</li>
<li>Enable full hardware acceleration in the Advanced Troubleshooting properties.</li>

Once I did that and rebooted, the ATI Control Panel came up with no problem at all and I could rotate my brand new 2005FPW at my leisure!

I wonder how a 2005FPW looks on a mac…