Question PC crashes upon installing AMD driver

[Phil Holm]

I have a pretty old laptop, Dell 15R SE, with an i7 3632QM and a Radeon HD 7730M, and it was working fine up until now. I didnt use my laptop for about a month because of my exams, and then after i finally turned it on it froze on startup. Then i reinstalled windows and noticed the pc freezes or crashes into a boot loop everytime i installed my gpu driver sometimes with a errorcode of "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED". The laptop works fine with my dedicated gpu disabled in the device manager.

Here are some things that i have tried but failed:
•Using DDU in and out of safe mode
•Using old, new or Nimez AMD drivers
•Using a system restore point
•Installing different versions of Windows
•Installing drivers in safe mode
•Using a different power adapter
•Cleaning and reapplying thermal paste

a few other notes, Microsoft Basic Adapter doesnt work, after I install the driver the fan speed bumps up and the pc freezes, and most importantly, my brother has the same model of laptop, he is running on the latest version of windows 10 albeit with older drivers, i tried doing the exact same thing but it didnt work for me.

 

[helpstar]

should be a hardware fault
try cleaning the dedicated GPU, repaste after cleaning the cooler

 

[Phil Holm]

should be a hardware fault
try cleaning the dedicated GPU, repaste after cleaning the cooler

I just got it cleaned and reapplied thermal paste, but with the same result.
Though i noticed some new things, while the laptop is frozen it keeps blowing hot air, which it wudnt before installing the driver.

I also noticed now it said "DPC Watchdog Violation" on the BSOD, then restarted itself normally and then was being laggy and then Blue screen'ed again saying "STOP CODE : VIDEO TDR FAILURE" and "What failed : atikmpag.sys"

 

[helpstar]

Eventually the solder balls below chip and motherboard are cracked or loosened after time. It´s clearly a hardware fault.

Reflowing could be a chance to revive it.
Use a heat gun (using additional flux would be recommended -> try filling the gpu chip underneath), tape all components around the GPU with aluminium foil or other heat resisting material

 

[CelicaGT]

I have an older Dell laptop, and a Dell AIO both with AMD GPU's. Once I upgraded to win10 from win8 the GPU's on both refused to cooperate. I tried the AMD "beta" driver that was around at the time to limited success (Long ass boot times in the hours, lockups, black screen, garbled images and BSOD's) Both machines ran just fine on Intel integrated graphics (AMD disabled in the Device Manager). I suspect the issue may be specific to the Dell implementation, sometimes there is a hardware layer between the intel GPU and the discrete one similar to what we would see with switchable graphics. I expect this isn't playing nice with win10. I have an older HP desktop with an AMD 7870 in it that runs just fine on these "unofficial" drivers. If you happen to solve this post it here as I'd be interested to find out what the issue is. My machine (the AIO) was needed for teleconferencing and the Intel GPU works fine for this so I left the AMD GPU disabled, it's been running fine for 3 years now in this function. The laptop went to a relative, set up the same way. I do not think this is a hardware failure but a compatibility issue.