Giglamesh's Laptop

So from day 1 my laptops GPU hasnt worked, it's a known problem that has no fix for it. I tried calling HP about it to fix it and it was 2 and half hours of confusion and disaster. The problem is the laptop is only using the onboard video card and not the Radeon card, there's no way to make it so the laptop uses the GPU, I've tried everything with the bios, with the Catalyst control, searched dozens of message boards, there is no fix for it.

So is there any ideas you guys can come up with, I'm thinking of taking out the old GPU and putting in a new one to see if it'll work, not sure if that's the problem or not. If so any recommendations for a nice cheap laptop GPU. I can barely play minecraft with this and I can't afford a new laptop.

I'll be building a desktop in the future.

Update:

In a HP forum board here's the problem detailed:

"Several recently-released HP notebooks do not have fully-functional switchable graphics. The dynamic switching works with DirectX applications, but not OpenGL applications (and from my experience, it does not work with 2D-accelerated DirectX applications, though that may be a different issue.)"

I would say its a driver problem, for example... I have an HP laptop with a Radeon HD 5XXX, I upgraded to windows 8 and i couldnt even watch a video on VLC right, the problem was that Readeon HD 5000 series for laptop and All-in-one do not work on Windows 8, Catalyst control did nothing to help, so I had to go back to Windows 7 and it worked fine there. Im not sure what card you have in yours though, hope you can fix it

Umm, 9 times out of 10, u can't really replace the laptop GPU loll. Nor can you buy a laptop GPU so u are kinda out of luck there unless your laptop is that rare. What some laptops have is a thunderbolt port so if ur laptop has that, I can recommend some thunderbolt gpus but those arent exactly cheap

With that being said, most likely, it is a driver issue... Search the model of ur laptop on HP's site and download the drivers. More often then not, most laptop manufactures, specially like HP, only use their own "custom AMD drivers" and not "official AMD drivers" so I suggest u do that

Yeh I tried updating drivers from AMD and HP for my GPU, it did nothing.

Hmm, have u tried going to device manager and seeing if there is any issues there?

Oh no, not the HP... :S

I wish i could help you with nice cheap laptop but i'm only desktop guy. The laptop is a known bad drivers & sometime you'll never update driver for GPU unless you need to check the company site, not AMD site.

I highly recommend you buy cheap pre-build PC or prefer build a cheap PC.

You could try calling hp again and stay persistent.
Also, which Catalyst are you using?Try, using the drivers and programs from HP, not AMD. I have an MSI with Intel gpu and a dedicated AMD Radeon, but the driver from AMD doesn't recognize it, it only works with the drivers from MSI.

Yeh it installed some drivers and didn't help nothing

I've tried the HP drivers they don't work. The Catalyst is currently not working at all :-/

In a HP forum board here's the problem detailed:

"Several recently-released HP notebooks do not have fully-functional switchable graphics. The dynamic switching works with DirectX applications, but not OpenGL applications (and from my experience, it does not work with 2D-accelerated DirectX applications, though that may be a different issue.)"