futurejp

Hi,

I have a ThinkPad T400 and I'm dual-booting Vista and 7. I've been playing games on Vista because it recognizes my ATI Mobility Radeon 3400 series graphics card while Windows 7 doesn't. When I first downloaded 7 I tried a lot to get an ATI driver to work, but I gave up for a while. I tried again today.

I went to this page: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx . Clicked on Windows 7 32-bit, then Mobility Radeon, then 3000 series. Then in 7, I ran the install. It extracted everything to F:\Program Files\ATI Technologies, then started the install wizard. In the middle of the wizard, the screen blinked a couple times, went black for a couple seconds, and then came back and showed my desktop. But only my wallpaper, that's all I saw. Kind of like when you open the Task manager and quit the explorer.exe process so you see nothing but your desktop. Anyway, I had no cursor, no anything. The only thing I could do was press Ctrl+Alt+Del, which would make the screen black, and then press Ctrl+Shift+Esc again which would show me my desktop again.

I restarted manually, and when I should've seen the logon screen, I just saw black. Assuming that the computer itself still worked, but the display didn't, I typed in my password and pressed enter, and it brought me to the screen where I just saw my desktop again. So indeed something is wrong with my graphics.

I restarted again in Safe Mode, went to Device Manager and uninstalled the 3400 series display driver. Then I restarted into 7, and I could see everything fine. But the taskbar gave me a popup saying it was installing a device, kind of like when you have to restart to complete installation and it continues once you're back. Then about a minute after 7 started up again since my restart, the screen blinked and I was back to only seeing my wallpaper.

I restarted again in Safe Mode, deleted the F:\Program Files\ATI Technologies folder, went to Device Manager and first disabled the ATI device and then uninstalled it. Then I restarted into 7, and again, about a minute after I was logged in the screen blinked and only showed me the desktop. No cursor or anything, just like the other times.

So can anyone help by either telling me what the heck happened or how to permanently fix it? The default, integrated graphics for my machine is some Intel chipset, not sure exactly but you guys probably know.

It seems like the installation, which is what was going on when the problem first happened, is still going on every time I restart, which is why the problem happens again a minute after each restart.

Thanks for all the help.

dai

download the driver from the download page for your model on the lenovo site

futurejp

Hi,

I've actually fixed that now, thanks, but I have a different (and hopefully easier) problem:

What I'm working with now is that I've installed drivers for my dedicated ATI card but when I right click on the battery gauge, go to Switchable Graphics, and click High Performance, the screen flickers a couple times but it doesn't actually switch. When I go back, it still says it's on Energy Saving.

I have a T400 and I'm running Windows 7, and I downloaded this driver for the ATI card: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...cid=MIGR-70417. It's the first driver that has worked for it. It installed, asked me to reboot, and upon rebooting a DOS window came up as it did diagnostic tests. I also installed this: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...cid=MIGR-70601 so I could get the battery gauge.

According to the installation, it seemed to go fine, seeing as the screen flickered, it ran diagnostic tests, etc. But when I look at dxdiag, it only lists one display, the Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family. And the ATI card isn't listed in the Device Manager under Display Adapters. So I think it's kind of confused.

To test it, I uninstalled the ATI drivers I had just installed. Then, when I went and right clicked on the battery gauge, the Switchable Graphics item was gone. So it knew that. Then I reinstalled the ATI drivers and the SG option was back. It just won't let me switch.

I think my computer is somewhere in limbo between not having anything installed for ATI and fully recognizing the graphics card.

Any help/ideas? Thanks.

dai

is the onboard chip disabled