Thinkpad T500 w/Switching graphics & Updated Drivers-- AMD/ATI side confirmed, but Intel?

so I bought a T500 with switching graphics off a friend back before new year's for 240,000 DOGEcoins. that was worth about $170 at that time.
Currently chugging along nicely with Win7 x64. Speccy:

a couple things are not from when I got it, and that includes the RAM, both hard drives, and also the screen, which was grafted in from an Inspiron 9100 successfully and without issue.

I installed the 2012 driver on Lenovo's support page for the T500/W500 for the switching graphics model and didn't have any outstanding issues-- it works great with said driver, and switching via the power manager battery icon is a breeze. so I had a thought last week and I installed the 13.9 legacy drivers, which has mobility radeon 3xxx support, atop the switching graphics driver, which also installs a new Catalyst Control Center... Lo and behold, aside from not being able to "configure switching graphics" anymore (the context menu link goes to a blank catalyst control center page that does nothing) everything on the ATI side works! and switching still works amazingly.

So now I'm wondering if this can also happen for the Intel side of things-- I'm still using the 2009 ATI-signed drivers for the chipset, hoping to take advantage of a newer driver revision for whatever that may birng. Is this possible? has anyone with a T500 (not sure if the W500 is also applicable since that has FireGL graphics) ever tried newer drivers for it? I'm reluctant to upgrade atop the Intel graphics drivers already in place since I'm scared it'll break switching, and require me to uninstall and reinstall the whole shebang of drivers all over again.

Thanks in advance!

 

You will be installing generic drivers when you install drivers straight from the ATI or Intel website. The Thinkpad programs do use the ATI or Intel drivers but Lenovo altered them to work with signature features and programs that are found in ThinkPad laptops. That is the reason why you are seeing a break in features. If you tinker with the Intel drivers I am quite positive you will face even bigger problems than you have now. The technology that it is built on is already quite old and development for the ATI 3650 is done with as far as I know.

 

I'm not saying there was even a problem to begin with; I never attempted to even configure the switching (I found the context link AFTER the driver upgrade), I just do it manually. I'm just wondering if there would possibly be breakage in the switching process from installing the generic Intel driver atop the 2009 driver supplied by ATI and rolled into the 2012 Lenovo driver.

 

Only one way to find out then.

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread for your report and say "I told you so!" :hi2:

 

In my experience, installing the generic AMD driver actually works fine, since AMD supports the manual ATI/Intel graphics switching in the T500. Trying to install the latest Intel drivers on top of that, though, tends to mess things up (loss of switching functionality, bugs when switching, etc) since Intel's drivers don't recognize the unique switchable nature of the setup.

I've just settled for getting it working, and then not messing with the switchable graphics drivers anymore.

 

Do you have any more info on this mod? is it a wuxga screen? is it superior to those offered on the thinkpads?