A quick moment of zen here. When you buy a laptop with an ATI video card, it's usually suffixed by "mobility," showing that the model has been somehow altered for use in the laptop world. OK, sounds good to me, there can't be much hardware difference if it's the same model, right? Well I'm not entirely sure about that, but here's what I do know:

ATI does not distribute drivers for mobility cards. For some crazy reason, they rely exclusively on the companies that produce the laptops to re-package the original Catalyst drivers into a format that works for their platform. I guess that kinda makes sense, but it leaves users like me in the cold. I bought my laptop from CyberPowerPC.com, and it's wonderful, but as a smaller-scale dealer, they don't produce these drivers.

And ah, the solution; Driver Heaven's Mobility Modder.net. It's a simple piece of software that alters the 'normal' Radeon drivers to properly install for a Radeon Mobility card of the same model. It's as simple as downloading the tool (and some specific Microsoft requirements like MSXML and the .Net Framework, or temporarily disabling UAC in Vista), downloading the driver you want, extracting the files, and then running the modder tool. Then, you just go ahead and install the driver just like you would for a PC.

Being able to get my Mobility x1600 updated to keep up performance? That's zen-inducing.