ATi has the good tradition of releasing a new set of video drivers each month, with performance improvements and fixes. Unfortunately owners of Radeon Mobility cards (on laptops) usually cannot benefit of these updates. Here I'll show you a simple workaround.
The problem
The monthly catalyst driver release from ATi's website cannot usually be installed on notebooks: because of some stupid vendor / license / OEM limitation, the installation will be blocked before completion and you'll be redirected to your laptop's vendor website in search for some updated drivers. This would be tolerable, if notebook vendors only updated the drivers on their websites once in a while... Usually you'll be stuck with some really old version for years. 
But there is hope... < Star Wars title song >
The solution
It is possible to actually fool the driver installer and let him think that your mobility card is actually supported by ATi. This requires a minor hack to the installer's .inf file (there used to be some kind of automated program that did the same thing, but it seems to have disappeared).
Unpack the installer
First of all, unpack the installer files to a directory of your choice. This is simply done by launching the installer you downloaded from ATi's website (the default directory should be C:\ATI\SUPPORT\[version]-[platform]-etc...). Once this is done, the installer will launch. You can abort it rightaway: if you go ahead it will abort as soon as it finds out that your card isn't supported.
Find out your hardware ID
In order to patch the .inf file, you must first find out what the unique ID of your graphical card looks like. In order to do this, simply open Windows' Device Manager, seek your card's entry, go into its properties and check the hardware details:
The numeric ID you see in the picture above is my graphical card's unique ID (an ATi Radeon Mobility X1700). Just copy it to the clipboard and close the device manager.
Get your hardware's chip name
Each graphical card is usually assembled putting a chip (the GPU) together with some memory and interconnecting the two with a bus (an ATi engineer would probably burst in laughter reading this, but...). Both chipset and memory are variable (type, size, frequency) and determine the final name under which your card is assembled and then sold. In order to install the right subset of the Catalyst drivers, you'll have to find out the exact codename of the chipset running your card.
To do this, you'll have to head to the ATi GPU comparison page on Wikipedia or the card's page on ati.com. In my case, my ATi Radeon Mobility X1700 actually features a RV535 chipset.
Patch the INF file
OK, now navigate back to the folder where you unpacked the driver installer and head to the directory Packages/Drivers/Display/LH_INF. You'll find a couple of files: open the bigger INF file (in the current driver version, the filename is CL_61008.inf) with notepad or a similar program. Ignore the header of the file and head down to the list of hardware identifiers (there's a lot of them). Now, simply try to spot a card similar to yours, mounting the SAME chipset of your card. For instance:
"Radeon X1700 FSC" = ati2mtag_RV535, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_71C1&SUBSYS_0880174B
This line means that the card named "Radeon X1700 FSC" will load the driver for the "RV535" chipset. Again, in my case I searched for an "X1600" or "X1700" card and then picked the first line with "RV535" in it. Copy the whole line, paste it on a new line just below and replace the hardware ID with the one of your notebook's graphical card and the name of the card. You should have something like this:
...
"Radeon X1650 Series Secondary" = ati2mtag_RV515, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_71A1&SUBSYS_5921174B
"Radeon X1700 FSC" = ati2mtag_RV535, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_71C1&SUBSYS_0880174B
"Mobility Radeon X1700" = ati2mtag_RV535, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_71D5&SUBSYS_12421043
...
Save and close the file.
Install the drivers!
That should be enough: launch the installer manually (launch Setup.exe in the driver's root folder, where you unpacked the installer, or update your drivers manually through the Windows device manager) and proceed as usual. The installer should recognize your hardware, will assume it is supported and then will install the driver for the chipset you specified. Hope that helps!
DISCLAIMER: as usual when you're doing something not foreseen by the installer, you could potentially destroy your operating system, your hardware, be killed in sleep by your mutated graphical card and so on... Eveything you do after reading this guide is at your own risk!
Yuppie.
And since the server will be powered on almost always, I needed to change that into something less noisy.
My adventures with the DMX Lightshow go on. 
