Intel Sucks, but more so with Toshiba

[DuelingWenches]

Hey all. I be a broke a$$ student, with my crummy, parent-bought toshiba satellite laptop. Toshiba has done this really stupid thing where they bug their systems to only use custom-made video drivers. AND, they made the horrible choice of choosing to do so with Intel drivers...

It is my understanding, as well, that 3.1 crashes with intel drivers that are not updated (which has been my experience so far). Sadly, when I go to update the drivers, the Intel drivers can't be installed, being incompatible with with Toshiba's horrible, 3 year out of date driver set-up, and Toshiba doesn't upgrade their custom drivers... I'd love to just buy a new computer, obviously, but for now I'm stuck with this one.

So, my questions are these:

first, is there any add on or anything at all that can be done to 3.1 to stop it from crashing with my crummy Intel driver?
second, if all those smarter than me when it comes to this stuff could tell me how to work around this stupid driver problem and get a real, up-to-date driver, that would be awesome.

I want to play 3.1!!!

[PkK]

Intel drivers on GNU/Linux are excellent. Maybe do a dual-boot install and play 3.1 on GNU/Linux?

Philipp

[Lord Apocalypse]

I once found a site that had a few threads from people with the same problem as yours along with some answers.. For the life of me I can't remember where, but knowing they are out there you should be able to google it. First place to try would be the toshiba forums (if they have any) or perhaps tomshardware.com

[stiv]

Some things that *might* help:

Turn off eye candy. If you are using a window manager with some sort of transparent themes (Aero, compiz, etc), turn it off.

Sometimes it helps to turn down hardware acceleration.

There may be some difference between running WZ full-screen vs running it windowed.

[DuelingWenches]

thanks all. im still hunting for answers but it is appreciated nonetheless

[Staff]

Just what toshiba model is it anyway, and what OS ?
Normally, you can use 7zip to extract all intel driver files from the installer to some directory.
Then, depending on the files, you could try updating the driver manually with those files, but that is a bit more complex, and you need to know what you are doing, and which files you are trying to replace.
It really depends on how much toshiba tinkered with the hardware, since if you are using the intel installer, and it won't let you, their might be a good reason for it.