At long last, I have finally been able to resolve some odd Windows 8 hardware compatibility issues with my Lenovo T400 laptop and Windows 8. I’m not sure if these are related to Windows 8 finally being available to the public or not.
A good bit of internet research revealed that for legacy hardware, like a T400, your best bet is not to use the general Windows 8 drivers come with the OS but rather to revert back to the latest version of the driver for Windows 7.
As I’ve posted here, I’ve been having problems with my display. Areas of the screen will at time fuzz out and become unreadable and I have to refresh the display to solve the issue. I’ve also had issues with my ATI Radeon Mobile 3400 chip overheating. My T400 has switchable graphics and in order to avoid the overheating problem I only used the Intel Mobile Series 4 chipset graphics driver. This created the fuzz out problems. Both of these graphics chips were using the built in Windows 8 WDDM 1.1 drivers.
Lenovo’s website has not been very helpful in terms of Windows 8 so I manually downloaded the latest Windows 7 switchable graphics driver. I installed it and then manually updated each graphics card driver using the Device Manager to the Windows 7 driver.
Presto – success! Not only did it solve my overheating problem but also my switchable graphics is working again and there are no more areas of fuzz out making my computer very difficult to use.
Through a bit more research, I discovered the Lenovo System Update utility has finally been updated and released for Windows 8. I installed it but it didn’t find any updates for my computer. Again, as this is legacy hardware there probably won’t be many drivers released specifically for Windows 8. As such, the Windows 7 drivers are the way to go. I did find it interesting that it didn’t find an update for my touchpad through the tool but I found an update for it manually on the Lenovo drivers list for the T400.
Another problem I had was with the wireless network indicator light. After the Windows 8 upgrade the light was on when the wireless was on and off when it was off. With Windows 7, it would flash to indicate activity. Reinstalling the latest Windows 7 driver, downloaded manually, also fixed that problem.
I’ve been running Windows 8 since mid-August and I’m just now starting to feel as though my laptop can be productive once again.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
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Hi, I am facing the same problem as you regarding the switchable graphics driver. I am able to install the windows 7 switchable graphics driver but i am unable to install the individual graphic card driver. Can you give a more detailed account on how you manage to solve this problem and if where to download the drivers involved. Thank you very much
ReplyDeleteI got my drivers from Lenovo and the switchable graphics driver for my model laptop includes both graphics card drivers. That made it easy for the T400 as when I installed one driver it automatically updated the other driver. The second issue is the need for a power management driver that can perform the switch between graphics cards during power state changes.
ReplyDeleteAnother trick is to manually force the graphics drivers to update by finding where the download installs the driver on your hard drive and then using the Device Manager to manually update the driver itself, keeping in mind it may be a previous version than Windows 8 wants.
Also don't run any auto updates as the dates of the drivers will be older than Windows 8 wants and will then try to install the latest version. Windows 8 WDDM 1.1 drivers for my T400 had an October date while the drivers that are working have a May 2012 date.
Finally, you can force the issue in your BIOS. The T400 allows me to select which card I want or the switchable option. By forcing it to use one graphics card or the other I was able to get 1 or the other Windows 8 drivers to work but the only way to make it work in switchable mode was to use the latest Windows 7 version.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
Some HP notebooks also has AMD Switchable Graphics, an alternative solution will be use their Win8 drivers:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.eightforums.com/graphic-cards/7088-win-8-amd-switchable-graphics-faq.html