techguy378
03-07-2012 12:27 AM (7 days ago)
I have an HP Pavilion dm4-1200 CTO Entertainment laptop with switchable graphics. For some reason when I install the 64-bit Windows 8 Consumer Preview the only graphics adapter that works is the integrated Intel one. I did a clean install of Windows 7 with the out of box restore option (not the minimal install one) using HP's recovery partition on the laptop. Then I did an upgrade to Windows 8 from within Windows 7 using the Windows 8 Consumer Preview setup program. Windows 8 does have a driver for the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 6370 GPU but in Device Manager it says the device cannot start. I've installed the latest graphics driver in Windows Update but I'm still having the same problem. If I install the beta Windows 8 driver on AMD's website my laptop's screen goes blank. The only way to get it back on is to boot into safe mode and use System Restore to roll back to the way my system was before installing the driver. What did HP do to this laptop to prevent the installation of non HP drivers? How do I get around this? I need the AMD graphics to work so I can use the HDMI port.
Paul_Tikkanen
03-07-2012 05:22 AM (7 days ago)
Hi:

Did you try the Windows 7 graphics driver from your notebook's support and driver page?

Unfortunately notebooks with switchable graphics can only use the drivers on the support page.

That is a source of complaints from owners who are not happy that the drivers on their notebook's support and driver pages are not regularly updated.

However, I doubt the bundled drivers in W8 will work on these specialty notebooks until the drivers are released to the PC manufacturers (HP, Dell, etc.).

Paul
Scoustar
03-07-2012 05:50 AM (7 days ago)
Right now I'm testing a generic (not HP supported) driver set and Catalyst Control Center.

S far everything's working well. The HP drivers are a disgrace, absolutely 100% useless.

If all performance tests return positive results I'll return with links to the sites.
techguy378
03-07-2012 11:31 AM (7 days ago)
I tried the Windows 7 driver on HP's website. The installer froze while trying to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable. This issue didn't happen in the Developer Preview release of Windows 8.