6770m + portal 2 issues?

I bought a HP dv6t Quad with the radeon 6770m card (2GB Version) and the 1920x1080 resolution screen two weeks ago. Once I made sure it worked out of the box, I formatted my base install without testing Steam games (stupid I know).

Since then I've re-installed my copy of windows with none of the base programs my computer comes with. I'm now having issues with loading portal2. I can see the valve logo, then it goes to the powered by source logo. It then goes to the picture of PBody and Atlas jumping a chasm but shortly thereafter it crashes.

I initially didn't have the Catalyst Control Center, but using the forums I found and installed 11.5b successfully, which brought back the catalyst control center.

I've been able to play all of my other games (WoW, LoL, Super Meat Boy, Portal, Starcraft II) without issues so I'm wondering if it's something with portal 2 detecting the correct video card (similar to what I've read people are having issues with Second Life 2 launcher), the video card driver, or some other driver I'm missing.

I think it may be an issue with the auto-switching video cards (it may not detect a card powerful enough, so it exits with the "Portal2.exe stopped working" error), but I'm not sure.

I formatted the restore partition so I can't go back and see if it works on a clean install. Can anyone out there with Portal 2 for the PC test it on their dv6t-6100 (product id: LM366AV on machine, LM720AV on my invoice... does that seem odd to anyone?) machine and let me know if it works?
Does anyone know a solution to make portal2 work? I'd like to finish the 2 player campaign.

 

Well,
I did a minimal system restore on mine (which is the same as a clean install but includes required drivers) and I can tell you that portal 2 works great on my notebook. Everything on full settings at 1080p. The thing about doing a clean install is that it is hard to trace down every required driver and piece of software since these things are so complicated now with swatchable graphics and such. If I were you, I would do a minimal system restore. It gives you all the benefits of a clean install (removes all the useless bloatware), but you don't loose any valuable driver either.

 

Should I just download the DVD for the laptop and then do a system restore from that (I've tried to download the DVD but it keeps timing out)? I've completely formatted that HP Restore partition because I didn't think I needed it anymore. I installed all the drivers that HP had on it's site (which may be the issue). Do you know how to get a dvd restore option going? Is there another way to get the minimal system restore done?

I find it funny that every single other steam game I own works as well as LoL, World of Warcraft and SCII.

 

Well, you should have created the restore DVD's before you wiped it clean. They put that partition in for a reason... I believe you can buy the dvd's for something like 15 dollars.

 

Portal 2 works fine on my 6100 as well, and that's even after I've screwed around with the drivers.

But if you want the recovery media, you can download it here:
Software & Driver Downloads HP Pavilion dv7t-6100 CTO Quad Edition Entertainment Notebook PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

 

When you find all the drivers post them up for us too! I just recieved the LM366AV as well with the 2.2 i7, 2gb 6770 radeon card, BT, 8gb ram, 500gb 7200 drive, and 1080 hd screen. I am shocked that the windows performance reviews shows 6.6 for graphics! any one else have these issues? How is your's rated after the reload? The HD sucks this system down drastically to a 5.9. I am thinking of replacing it with an SSD, once I find one reliable enough. Any thoughts?

 

There are a number of people who have put SSDs in their dv6/7ts, look in the owners and modding threads. The nice thing about the dv7t is it has a second hard drive bay so you can still have a monster standard drive for storage then a smaller fast SSD for boot and a few games and such.

 

Thanks for the link (it didn't work for me last time I tried it!), unfortunately it doesn't let me download that directly, so I'll have to buy the disc and wait. The reason I did the clean wipe and format is that I had a copy of windows 7 ultimate installed on my old laptop that I'm going to format and put Windows 7 Home premium on instead. Is there a way to update the Home version to Ultimate after I do a recovery?

 

Buddy of mine bought the dv6tqe and couldnt burn the 2nd disk, it kept failing. He called up HP and told them that and they are sending him the disks for free. You could try that.

Err I mean, you should be honest with HP... I'd never try that...

 

I actually had a dv7 first... then it got stolen.. so I went with the dv6. I really only need one drive, but I would like one reliable enough to not worry about drive fade for 3-4yrs first.

I am actually more concerned about the graphics right now and seeing what we can do about them. Also, drivers.. I hate having a pc without backups!

 

Yes, you can always upgrade any version of window 7... Go to:

Control Panel \ System and Security \ System

There will be a button that says "get more features with a new version of windows"

 

Thanks for your help everyone! I've got Portal 2 working! What I ended up doing was deleting all of portal 2 from the steam folder and then downloading it again. I think when I brought over my savegame files from before some graphic settings came with it. I forgot that portal 2 backs up the savegame files to steam's "clouddrive" so when you install the game they get put back there automatically! By just leaving everything alone I was able to get into the game.

Thanks again for the help. Looks like I didn't need the recovery disk after all. For those of you that do a clean install... Go to the HP site, download all of the drivers on there for your system, then go install the Catalyst 11.5b drivers so that you get the CCC back and games will work.

I'm so psyched to be able to finish portal 2's co-op campaign!

 

Great news! Don't forget to update your AMD catalyst to 11.6

AMD Catalyst 11.6 WHQL (8.861 May 24) - Download & Discussion - Guru3D.com Forums

now if we can just find a better finger print reader program than hp simplepass. It really is a pain! I have passwords to be typed in or use the fingerprint reader instead!

And I also found my answer on the graphics card. 6.6 is normal for these. We will see if adjusting windows and the latest updates help any.

 

After 11.6 my Windows experience level is still at 6.6 for graphics (both gaming and regular) My Ram is 7.6 and processor is 7.4. My 7200 rpm drive is the main bottleneck with 5.9, but I'm not willing to give up the space and reliability for the speed. Maybe if I could put a second hard drive in the spot of the blue-ray player...

 

Yeah I hear you... I am going to wait until DEC or so.. SSD will come down more and single threads should be in the current price range. I am quite happy with it right now if it wasn't for the keyboard being half flexed out and some other issues like the speaker grill being loose on the left side.

 

Yeah, i'm having the same issue with the keyboard. What I did was I removed it and saw that underneath there is a solid sheet of metal, not a bunch of chips. Thus, the flex will not damage the rig and I immediately felt more comfortable pounding away. For the price, a few little things like that can be tolerated.

 

i'm having the same issue with TF2. I guess I'll try redownloading it, but I don't see how that would help haha

i'm intrigued by steam cloud being the issue though. is there a way to prevent it from grabbing my graphics config file?

 

It wasn't that the steam cloud was the issue... it's that I apparently copied too many files from my old computer into the new steam install folder. It didn't like my old Portal 2 that I installed on my HP dv5t 1000 with an NVidia graphics card. I wonder if I copied too many of the config files over and it was looking for an nVidia card instead of my Radeon 6770M. I just wanted to make sure my savegame files were there!

 

last time I played team fortress 2 was on a 1080p monitor with an nvidia card, so your logic is actually making sense to me. it was saved to the steam cloud, so what I did was uninstall tf2 through steam, delete the folder under steam apps, and i temporarily disabled steam cloud. the game is redownloading/installing right now, and I'll let you know how it works.