ATI mobility driver won't install? Please help!

[scottias]

I am pretty ignorant when it comes to computers, so bear with me. I posted this on the toshiba support forums a couple days ago but no one has responded.

I got my laptop two months ago mostly for practical reasons but I also wanted to play some Starcraft2. I chose a laptop that I thought would have a decent graphics card and since I heard that Starcraft2 is not too graphics intensive, I got this Toshiba laptop with a ATI radeon mobility 5650 card. When I first started up the game, it said it couldn't read what my graphics setup was and to manually adjust the settings. And the game does work OK most of the time: when I start a game it's at ~40 FPS. But when there is a lot of stuff going on in the game (like when playing a 3v3 with sizable armies on both sides) the game slows down drastically to 5 FPS or less and is unplayable.

So I check out the AMD website and download the driver for my card and then once I try to install it this is what comes up:

Then I go to the Toshiba website and try to install the driver from there but I end with a windows error message saying the program has stopped responding.

Another thing I find peculiar is that in device manager and look under display adapters, I have two drivers, one named

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series

the other

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650

I thought that I should only have one.

Anyways, maybe I shouldn't be expecting from it as much as I do. I just looked at the hiearchy of graphics cards(on this website) and thought it would be better. Or it could be the game, as I've heard other people have had FPS issues with good comps. Or it could have something to do with the rest of my comp:

Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II P920 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~1.6GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM

Is there anyway to check to see if my graphics card is working properly or to its full potential?

Thankyou

 

[scottias]

My laptop is a Satellite A665D-S6059 Is that what you were looking for?

 

[scottias]

Thanks for your help. That makes a lot of sense. I've done a little more research and I tried disabling each one individually to see what results. When I do disable the 5650, starcraft does play considerbly worse, so I assume its working as intended.

I do still wonder why I can't install an updated driver for the card, but maybe that's not important.

 

[strangestranger]

Hi, basically it is not supported on toshiba notebooks, they opted out of supporting the mobility drivers. I believe there are hacks around it but it is not supported as is.

If you read the release notes you would have known this. Switchable graphics has nothing to do with the problem.

As for not being able to download a new driver from toshiba, you would probably be best running a driver sweeper and trying again.

 

[hardwaretechy]

The case with laptops is simply this -- you cannot update your drivers from the video card manufacturer (AMD/Nvidia) because they signed away the rights for the mobility cards to the laptop manufacturers. This means that you can ONLY install drivers that are available from the laptop manufacturer (Toshiba)'s website. The reason you are probably having trouble with that one is that you didn't clean out the old ones, so run driver sweeper as strangestranger suggested.

Ok - what I said above is True, however, it is also omitting another truth. There IS a way to install the update AMD drivers. It isn't a hack persay, rather a program that rewrites a few config files and then allows them to properly install. I think its called ATI Mobility Modder but i'm not 100%, i haven't done it in a long time but I did use it on my mobility 3850 included in my laptop from a few years back and it does work. Just google around, if you can get it to work, it will give you far better performance.

 

[strangestranger]

You're behind the times, ati are releasing mobility drivers same as desktop, only thing is some laptop brands opted out of this scheme. Also one or two other exceptions but most brands are supporting them.