Graphics card on laptop will only work with WDDM drivers

[peagles]

Hi all,

A bit of a strange one I can't get my head round.

I have recently fired up my laptop after about a year of not using and I was immediately presented with a BSOD with a atikmpag.sys error (it was fine when last used). After reading up on this, the error points to corrupt drivers. So I downloaded the latest drivers from the AMD website, used a third party utility to completely remove the old drivers and the same error occurred. After repeating the process countless times and not getting anywhere I decided to give it a complete clean install of Windows 7.

The install went fine and Windows loaded the WDDM 1.1 drivers for the card and finally it booted up normally with no BSOD. After all the updates had installed I then updated the drivers again from the AMD website and the same BSOD occured. I tried this a second time and they finally worked but a strange artifact appeared round the cursor and some windows and then the machine reset itself.

So it appears my laptop will only take the default WDDM drivers and nothing else. I never had this problem before because I can remember running the latest drivers in the past.

These are drivers I used: Legacy

Any suggestions?

 

[Mellon Head]

The only drivers you should use in a laptop are from the laptop's manufacturer. The reason for this is that laptop manufacturers often have their hardware optimized by their own people, and have different BIOS requirements. This is particularly true of laptop main boards and their graphics chips. Your graphics card may have been built by AMD, but it was made specifically to your laptop manufacturer's specs and requirements.

Hence the need for your manufacturer's drivers. They've no doubt been tweaked in some way. The standard drivers from the AMD website are made for desktop graphics cards, not laptops.