Help: My Laptop Lost more than Half Its Resolution

Hardware GPU
1

I apologize if this Display Adapter help request should appear in a different forum.

I have an HP Pavilion DV7 Entertainment Laptop (dv7-2180us). When I bought it, it came to me running windows vista which hp upgraded to windows 7 and when the windows 10 upgrade occurred, i updated it to 10 without issue.

It has a natural display resolution of 1920x1280 and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 for graphics.

I keep this laptop to the side of my desktop and tend to use it for watching videos, browsing for help while in games, listening to music, etc. Occassionally, my son will use it to play games such as rust or minecraft. It is not used or even open 24-7 like my desktop, but when it is, it has also been at the 1920x1280 resolution.

Recently, perhaps a month or so ago, I opened it up and it was at a lower resolution, unable even to display all the icons on my desktop. I looked to change the resolution, but it told me the max available was 1152x864 and it recommended only using 1024x768. 800x600 was also available, but no others.

As I don’t depend on this machine except in emergencies, I gave up futzing with it after a couple hours of reboots and attempts at updating windows. I had previously disabled the hp bloatware that it came with.

Today, wishing to make use of it again, I tried to contact hp’s online forums for help. I eventually found someone with had a similar issue a day or two after Thanksgiving on a similar but slightly different type of dv7. Fully a week later, he received a snarky reply from an “HP Expert” that told him that ATI states that their ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series don’t support windows 10. Apparently https://goo.gl/qzV2Kp

I found that ATI has drivers for up to windows 8, but not beyond. https://goo.gl/oDLduT

All I really know for sure is that this was working properly in windows 10 at the laptop’s natural resolution about a month ago and something changed without my being aware – i’m guessing some sort of windows update – and now i can no longer use the resolution of the laptop’s built in monitor. HP is unwilling to help/support the device. ATI apparently does not (perhaps any longer) make a windows 10 compatible driver available.

BTW, this worked properly with the Windows Spring (I think) Creative Update. I had hoped that the current Fall Creative Update might fix it back. It did not.

This device is not a super strong computer, but, it works plenty well enough for me, but I depended on that higher resolution. Now I feel that something (1.46M pixels) has been taken from me without my consent. Someone – Microsoft(?), HP(?), ATI(?) – has disabled my machine from displaying any resolution higher than 1152x864 on either its internal monitor, or on a 2nd monitor.

If there is a technical solution to this, please advise. I don’t know what my options are. Could it be possible to somehow discover and reinstall the original driver? Could it be possible to remove some unknown windows update that has messed this up?

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Just to update, I discovered that I could uninstall & delete the current driver for the display adapter and that after reboot, it would revert to 1600x900, currently both the recommended and highest available resolution.

This is still 41.4% loss from the monitor’s physical resolution, but nothing near the 69.5% loss previously.

Still if anyone has any ideas, I’m eager to listen.

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Yeah, AMD dropped support for those chips with Windows 10 and Microsoft isn’t supporting them through Windows Update. I recently had to replace the graphics card in my grandfather’s computer for this exact reason.
The only solutions are to upgrade your laptop, downgrade to Windows 8.1 or switch to Linux. Which given what you use it for, shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

3 Likes
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The driver for windows 8.1 wont install? Install the latest version of crimson and see what it says.

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Thank you two for your feedback.

Adubs:
No, the w8.1 driver install program aborts saying it is incompatible with w10.

Stenstorp:
Unfortunately, as a laptop, I can’t change the graphics adapter which I suspect is chips on the motherboard rather than a graphics “card”. I’m not yet ready to entirely give up on windows and switch to linux. w8.1 is a possibility, but, this system had w7 on it and it went directly to w10. is “downgrading” to w8.1 even possible?

With my partial fix of 1600x900, its only a 40% resolution loss compared to the previous 70%. I’m not satisfied with this, but this process has been taking up too much of my time.

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Download a Linux distro and boot off it and see if you get your full resolution. You don’t have to even install it, a Live image like Ubuntu will be fine.

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Of course, you can burn a Win8.1 install disc and use it to wipe the laptop’s drive and set up a fresh install of 8.1. You’ll lose all your settings and files, but you can back them up by hand if you have anything on the laptop.

Some laptops do have discrete, removable graphics cards that you can replace. Power draw can be an issue; if the new card needs more power than the battery can provide, you can only use it while plugged in. You might even need a new power cable that can supply more power (the brick in a laptop power cable is the same as your desktop’s PSU, has a maximum wattage). Wouldn’t recommend due to being in completely uncharted territory, and the prices on laptop cards aren’t usually very good iirc.

I’d try playing with DDU and installing drivers in compatibility mode if possible. The generic Windows drivers might work better or at least different than the AMD drivers (or you might have fallen-back to them already). Testing a Linux boot stick would be a good idea before you do anything serious, just to make sure the hardware isn’t borked.

Having the native resolution is important for an LCD, non-integer scaling looks awful on UI elements. Hope you can get it working again.

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Guys stop over thinking this.

Disable driver signuture verfication, then try to install the 8.1 driver and report back.

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This seems like a bad idea. Is this possible on a per-device/driver level or system wide? (Not a windows user so don’t yell at me for being stupid :slight_smile: )

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Should be system-wide. Doesn’t really matter: basically Win10 is annoying in the fact that microsoft has to approve basically every driver on the system. If OP doesn’t want to purchase a new laptop, this might be a plausible workaround.

2 Likes
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Then quit posting in a windows help thread. Youre effectively gas lighting and spreading fud.

Im not sure if yoy can reanble after but i see no issue if running a good huerstic based anti-virus. If you keep UAC even if a unsigned driver from a usb were to install UAC would ask to conutine iirc. Could be wrong but either way im pretty sure this is ops only option.

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Helped a user with a similar problem just last week, her desktop with an old AMD card would not list more than 1024x768 as an available resolution. Though the card series was named correctly in the device manager I found that the driver actually used was the Microsoft Basic Display Driver (or named as somesuch). The system initially delivered with Windows 7 had been running fine with Windows 10 for a good while, then probably reverted to the basic display driver after the Fall Creators Update.

Anyway, installing the latest AMD Beta driver for Windows 8.1 64bit solved the problem, and the driver did not complain. Though this was a desktop as mentioned.