I'm a man on the edge...
Two days ago, after not applying updates to my laptop for a while, I caved in to HP notification pressure and let the thing do its business.
Part of this was a BIOS update - whatever that is - amongst other things that at the time I didnt care to note. I'll mention at this point that I'm about as technically aware as an orange so please bear with me...
As it began restarting (after the update) the graphics/display started going haywire. Flashing coloured lines, diagonal lines, fading windows, flashing desktop icons, laggy taskbar movements, flickering windows, ghosting, the lot...
In utter panic and to great stress through the flickering, I managed to back-up my personal files onto an externl hardrive and attempted to do a system restore to just before I began the update process.
The system restore was succesful, in the sense that it completed succesfully, but the graphics problem still remained. After looking at quite a few forum posts on my phone, I decided to do a 'system refresh'
Again this happend as it should but the graphics problem still remained. Soon after, amid mad flashing, a pop-up box appeared informing me that "AMD Display Driver had stop responding and had succesfully restarted..."
"Aha! the culprit!?" I exclaimed, not knowing if it was or not. But sure enough, after reading a few more forum posts and uninstalling the AMD Display Driver, the problem was resolved!
I figured that an update to this display driver was applied and that's what was causing the problem, 'maybe it didnt install right or something? - I thought.
With this in mind, I went over to the AMD website and reinstalled the latest AMD Catalyst Display Drivers (Omega-14.501.1003?) for my laptop (based on what the AMD Auto Detect Utility recommended). Didnt work... the problem came back as soon as the installation progress got to the 'AMD Display Driver' part. I unistalled the drivers...
Then I tried to download and install the previous version (13.12) to see if this would work, it didnt, problem came back during install as before. Uninstalled!
What I have now is a 'Microsoft Basic Display Driver' and the graphics work fine with that, but I like to play games on my laptop and i'm not sure if the basic display driver will be enough to handle higher settings? heck... I don't even know what a display driver is for!!!! and my display brighness buttons dont work why...?
How can I fix this? Where can I get an AMD Display Driver that works? Do I even need it? Was it the BIOS update (what's a BIOS update?) that ruined my life? - Please help...... and also my display brightness buttons dont work why... WHY?
Op System - Windows 8.1 (64-bit) (x64) - fully updated with all availible windows updates
My Graphics Hardware: A8-6410 APU
Processor: AMD A8-6410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics
Happy to provide further info if needed! Please keep it simple, think orange...
Thanks,
M