Update on Lenovo T400 Switchable Graphics Drivers?

I remember a Lenovo employee claimed on the forums that there would be a switchable graphics driver support for Windows 7 due for August, 2010

It's now october, and the Lenovo forums shows no new signs of the driver update since 2009!

any ideas??

 

I believe they have had some issues updating the drivers and are still working on them.

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T5...with-Win-7/td-p/169489/highlight/true/page/17

 

JabbaJabba is correct. They thought they'd have them out by now, and then found more problems and delayed the release.

That said, it is pathetic that Lenovo didn't take things more seriously earlier on; it's been nearly a year since the last release of Switchable Graphics drivers. During that time, all T400/T500 users have been stuck with the battery-life issue from the bugs, and woefully dated drivers as well.

I myself have switched to discrete-only mode so I could run ATI's latest Catalyst drivers and have Flash 10.1 acceleration, but that's not the solution I would prefer to have.

 

Question: Someone on my local Craigslist is selling a T400 (with both the Intel 4500MHD and the ATI 3470) for $475. It has the T9400 and 4GB and a 160GB 7200rpm HDD. It also has the WXGA+ screen. Is this a good deal? Like the poster above, I would just put it into discrete-only mode and use the ATI card exclusively because I'll put Windows 7 x64 on it and I won't be using it on battery much at all.

It seems like a good deal but I would appreciate any thoughts from T400 owners.

Thanks

 

475 dollars is not a bad price for a top spec T400 with switchable graphics card. You probably can haggle a bit to say 430 dollars or so.

 

Thanks. I also thought it sounded pretty good. I do, however, worry about the issues this model has experienced due to buggy graphics drivers and problematic Windows 7 support. I'm hoping that by using only the ATI card I'll avoid most problems.... I won't be doing any "switching".

 

I accidentally just found a way to update to newer drivers than Lenovo's without losing Switchable Graphics trying to do what you wrote here.

What I did was:

-Select Discrete Only in the bios.
-Also select Let OS Detect Switchable Graphics in the bios.
-Install desktop CCC 10.6.

I'm not sure I'm getting Flash acceleration though. Running latest Flash in Win 7 x64 with Firefox.

 

I am wondering if what you just posted regarding accidentally updating ATI drivers retaining switchable graphics would work on Vista Business 32bit like I am still running?

Gary

 

No, even with ATI's new drivers, the resume-from-standby issue still exists in Windows 7. For now, my temporary fix is to use hibernate instead of standby.