W500 driver/BIOS issue - or a dead HD3650?

[Ahrle]

Hi,

Just got myself a W500 from my job yesterday. Haven't used a Thinkpad for years so it was a nice surprise, as it was going to get thrown away when I found it. After getting a Kingston SSD and 8 gigs of RAM I went home and installed everything.

Unfortunately, this didn't end very well. At first, I only found one GPU under devices list, the HD3650, which got the description "this device cannot start". I didn't pay more attention to that after a day at work, so I started browsing a bit. After an hour or so, I got a trojan continously spamming the UAC trying to access CMD, finally resulting in a shutdown. I downloaded MSE which found the trojan and removed it, causing the final death of it... aswell as the whole Windows installation.

Until that point, I didn't even notice how hot it actually ran. I picked it up while updating the new W7 installation, and more or less burned myself underneath it. Core Temp reported the CPU constantly running at about 73-78ºc while installing the updates. Therefore, I put it on its left side on the floor to cool it down underneath, without paying attention to the fan grille which made it shut down yet again.

After that, the HD3650 haven't showed up a single sign of life anymore. This is what I've tried so far:
1. Installed, uninstalled, wiped and reinstalled drivers from Lenovo and AMD:s particular websites. The 3650 doesn't even show up in Device Manager, it seems totally replaced by the Intel one.
2. Installed Lenovo PM tools with no visible option to swap between GPU's.
3. Swapped BIOS setting from "Switchable" to "Discrete", ending up with a totally black POST screen until BIOS battery is taken out (HDD led doesn't flash either, which makes me believe it doesn't even boot in that mode).
4. Tried both to report and not to report switchable GPU's from BIOS.

I'm not really sure how to proceed, and if the 3650 is still alive...

[QWERTY Andreas]

Hi
What OS are you using?

Under Windows 8, its quite tricky to get the driver rigth.

Best regards

[Ahrle]

Hi
What OS are you using?

Under Windows 8, its quite tricky to get the driver rigth.

Best regards

Thanks for the reply! I was using Win 7 Ultimate x64 until today, thought of installing Vista as it seemed to have better compatibility with the swappable drivers. But now it's not a problem anymore, as the Thinkpad now is completely dead after being connected to the outlet during the night. It does not show any sign of life; the charging LEDs are dead and the 10x power button trick doesn't work either. Tried the PSU with my X61 and it works like a charm. Too bad as I've got my 2x4GB sticks of DDR3 for the w500 today (didn't work with the Corsair ones I firstly got), now it all have to visit the scrapyard

[RealBlackStuff]

Rather than throw it away, why not get another motherboard, if the rest is still working?