HELLPP anyone with switchable graphics on windows 8

I've bought an envy 6 with gma 4000/ amd 7670 and wiped windows7 where switchable gfx worked fine and installed windows 8 Ent. Installed the latest drivers from hp for win 7 x64 but catalyst/switchable gfx won't start and I can't switch between the cards . I can see both in device manager and drivers are installed. Tried installing the driver from hp in compatibility mode tried lishcat driver but I can't switch between them in any way. Would appreciate any opinions regarding this. Whenever I try to start catalyst control center or switchable graphics I get " Catalyst control center cannot be started. There are currently no settings that can be configured using Catalyst control center."

 

Wipe windows 8, reinstall windows 7

 

hm iwould wipe the drivers and reinstall. switchable graphics is working on my envy

 

Have you tried installing the generic Intel graphic driver and AMD graphic driver separately?

Since 12.9, AMD allowed you can install those separately. (This even works on the older generation of switchable AMD/Intel graphics down to the 5000 series)

 

I've managed to fix this with 12.8 driver but why my battery is now 4h compared to 6+ like I had on windows 7
While IDLE the system has the fallowing clocks:
CPU 800mhz (seems fine)
GMA 4000 350gpu/800ram GPU load is on gma which seems to be fine.
AMD 7670 300gpu/150ram (0% gpu load)

Are the clock right for the gfx cards?

 

Yes those clocks seem fine for idle.

 

I also noticed a dropoff in battery life going from Win7 to Win8 on the notebook in my sig.

 

I'm thinking it might be something to do with this thing called hp coolsense which i've noticed in the taskbar an Icon while I had win7. I've installed coolsense but it doesn't seem to do anything and battery life is still crap like 4g with 100% battery. On HPs site they say up to 8h and if I wouldn't had win7 before I would think they were just bsitting but I've seen it. Anyone any ideas? Cause I don't want to wipe and put winodows just to see whats going on.

 

I don't think coolsense (which controls when the fan activates) is the issue. I suspect you can attribute the services and programs running in the background of Windows 8 to be responsible for the battery drain. If you look at the notebook retailers websites for identical hardware systems (or close to it) with the only difference being Windows 7 vs Windows 8 the Windows 8 systems are quoted as having less battery life than the 7s. As an example look at the HP dv6-7014nr (windows 7) and hp dv6-7214nr (windows 8) systems.

My recommendation is either run a program (like Startup Inspector) or read on the web what programs you can disable from starting when the system loads, and what services you can set to disabled or manual. Since Windows 8 has been heavily touted as a touch screen operating system it probably has some programs/services related to that built in to run at system start (and running in the background). Since your system doesn't have a touch screen I recommend you disable any features that have to do with that...

 

Its not that cause I have no CPU activity at all 0-5%. I really don't know what else to check if the GPUs and CPU clocks are fine but I can tell you one thing, on windows 7 my laptop was cooler and the fan was stopping from time to time which is not happening on win 8. Seems there are other ppl having this issue.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1321275/windows-8-poor-battery-life/10

 

Just wanted to say I managed to figure it out. The issue was the video driver. Although it seemed to be working fine it was something wrong with it. I removed amd and intel drivers with driver fusion and installed leshcat again and seems to be fine now, gained an extra 2h of battery