Can only use "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" as my graphics driver

TV2 said:

Good to hear that the new card is functioning better than the old one.

Do you think the black boxes are video artifacts (like you get if a DVD or digital video loses signal) or does it look more like a feature of the browser that is not initializing?

I thought of Pixelation issues is this what you meant ?

UnknownAK said:

The black boxes kind of look like artifacts however if i highlight the part of the page it is on, the boxes will disappear. It's like part of the page isn't being loaded in properly when i switch back to a page.

Also I know this is unrelated but for some reason one of my folder icons keeps changing, I have it set to a custom icon and randomly it will revert back to being the default folder icon and then sometimes when i click back to my desktop it will have changed back to my custom icon. Anyone have any ideas what that is about? As i said it doesn't matter as its unrelated

Black boxes small or large, pixelation would come with a freeze up at same time, similar to what you see with Digital TV.
Again which browser and all browsers do this ?
Not sure about icon change, but how did you go about changing the default for these icons ?

UnknownAK said:

Hi,

I'm having a really annoying issue where the only working driver I can use is the "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter". Every single other driver I have tried will all cause me to experience BSOD and the error message "Display Driver Has Stopped Responding". The issue appeared a month ago and it has took me up until yesterday to single it down to be a driver issue and not some kind of hardware fault.

My graphics card is a Sapphire R9 280x and so I use AMD Catalyst Drivers. The issue first came about when updating to 15.7.1 back when I was on Windows 7. I updated to Windows 10 to see if this would resolve my error but it still persisted exactly as it did before. So far I have tried using 15.7, 15.7.1, 15.8 beta and I have even tried just using the driver that Windows will install for my graphics card and all of these cause the errors I mentioned before. Using the basic driver allows me to watch videos and browse the internet fine however games are unplayable as the FPS is between 1-10 when usually it would be 60-120.

I am desperate to find a solution to this as I am just starting university tomorrow and I really miss being able to play games with my friends.

Any suggestions will be welcomed as I am willing to try anything at this point.

I have a very similar issue, and I can confirm that this is a hardware problem. My video card chip is busted, as confirmed by a hardware repair store, and both Windows and Linux AMD drivers produce artifacts and crash after a while.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter driver works without a glich in simple desktop applications, and can even handle YouTube. The only issue is the resolution.

Windows 8 users may try a modification of BasicDriver.sys that you can find on github (Google: basic_adapter_driver_modification), which gives you higher resolutions with the Basic Drisplay Adapter, but otherwise you're stuck with the low resolution.

I actually think it's a decent trade-off. If the alternative is not being able to use the laptop at all. I'm sure many laptops with busted video cards may be safely used for office work with this minimal driver.