Question Issue in video with Toshiba laptop ?

[csanjay]

Hi all,

I have a Toshiba Satellite A350 , purchased in 2009 with an ATI Radeon HD 3400 series graphics card. Centrino 2 processor with 3GB Ram , Windows Vista Home. The original sata harddisks - hitachi failed recently and I upgraded to crucial ssd - 512 GB. I upgraded to windows 10 home , 64 bit edition and it runs reasonably ok. I installed some of the toshiba drivers and some were included in
the OS.

I had issue with wifi being disabled by windows OS (wifi settings - wifi turned ) and later my service person hotwired the switch internally and I also got an external wifi dongle. Wifi on toshiba has an external switch in front and also fn f8 key controls it. I recently started having problem with the video display. It happens after reboot following software update -windows , antivirus. It could be a coincidence.

There is no display in the laptop screen. Pressing the power off button, and then clicking esc seems to address the issue sometimes , and the video appears on the laptop screen. On connecting to an external monitor , tv ,the video is displayed clearly, via hdmi port

I had connected a bootup cd - kali linux and display came up . On restart , internal display worked. It has been hit / miss. I had tried fiddling around with the power plan settings - sleep , resume for the power button , actions in battery / plugged on state.

The fast startup option is enabled . ati graphics power settings. ati powerplay settings.

bios power on option display is auto select - phoenix version 2.30

The windows display driver is ati mobility radeon hd3400 series 8.970.100.9001 version , 13-01-2015. 256mb memory card.

monitor driver in windows is generic pnp monitor.

Unable to tell if its bios , hardware , windows , driver issue .

I would appreciate your suggestions on fixing this issue.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Lutfij]

You can try and install the driver in Compatibility mode, i.e, Right click installer>Properties>Compatibility tab>Windows X(from the drop down menu) where x denotes the OS that the drivers are meant for.

How on Earth did you install Windows 10 onto a laptop with an unsupported processor? In 2025, you're better off allocating resources to another system as 3GB is pointless in 2025 whereby 16GB is the bare minimum by todays standards, not to mention that Windows 10's support runs aground towards the end of this year.

Unable to tell if its bios , hardware , windows , driver issue .
Very certain it's a multitude of things, Windows 10 on older hardware have been known to cause stress on them to cause them to fail eventually. I've dealt with laptop's that had chipsets running hotter than usual when migrated over to Windows 10 on laptops that showed support for Windows 10 but were built when Windows 7 first came out.

 

[BFG-9000]

While Windows 10 does not even officially support even Sandy Bridge processors like i7-2700k, it has always worked with Core 2 including the Montevina processors in Centrino 2, which were 45nm Penryn.

Centrino 2 added switchable graphics, which unlike modern laptops that always render through the IGP, switch between the discrete GPU and the IGP to save power. This kind of setup proved to be problematic when using drivers not supplied by the laptop manufacturer, and even then the IGP and discrete GPU drivers often had to be installed in a specific order.

8.970.100.9001 is the only Windows 10 driver available for HD 2000/3000/4000 series but was written by Microsoft for the original RTM launch 1507 build of Windows 10 so doesn't support Catalyst Control Center or even OpenGL. If you want to try the latest official ATI driver it's AMD_Catalyst_13.4_Legacy_Beta_Vista_Win7_Win8 but you have to install it manually:

1: Download the legacy driver and extract it or run the installer, but close it after it unpacks all the installation files to C:\AMD (or you may be able to simply run it in windows 8 compatibility mode with administrator rights!)
2: Open Device Manager
3: Under Display adapters right click on the adapter used in your system and click Update Driver Software
4: Click on the second option Browse my computer for driver software
5: Click 'Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer'... in the next menu and Have Disk... on the following
6: Click Browse on the pop-up menu and go to: C:\AMD\AMD_Catalyst_13.4_Legacy_Beta_Vista_Win7_Win8\Packages\Drivers\Display\W86A_INF
7: Select the first .inf file - In my case this was: C7156445.inf - and click open
8: Select the model from the list that corresponds to your hardware - if there are multiple then just select the first - and click Next. Afterwards the driver should install accompanied with several screen flickers
9. Now re-run the legacy driver installer from AMD and have it install the Catalyst Control Center
10. Restart the computer

This allows the use of CCC and OpenGL in Windows 10 with a Legacy card.

It is important to note that the Driver Version installed this way according to the device manager is 8.970.100.0 from 24APR2013, so older than the version installed automatically by Windows 10: 8.970.100.9001 dated 13JAN2015. Later versions of Windows 10 may automatically replace the older driver so you may have to change some settings to prevent this. You'll know this has happened if CCC cannot launch.