My laptop is a "HP Pavilion 17-F042NR 17.3" Laptop, AMD A10-5745M Quad-Core 2.1GHz, 8GB DDR3, 1TB SATA" running on Windows 8.1 64-bit, in case that matters for helping me out. It's new to me, but is a refurb; I've only had it for two days and want to see if I can fix the deal breaker issues I'm having without sending it back since I desperately need a new computer anyway.
First issue: the monitor quality seems terrible. All images, even those built into the Operating System, look like indexed .gif or heavily compressed .jpg files and colours don't seem to blend right together. For example, even on a bucket-filled area of pure colour allows me to clearly see the vertical rows of pixels which comprise the screen so that it doesn't look like a solid area. Obviously, this is highly annoying and not at all acceptable. Worse, the Catalyst Control Center only offers settings such as hue, contrast, etc. which do nothing to control this issue. The Catalyst Controls on my seven-year-old Pavilion dv7z are more fully featured and the screen displays nicer.
I'd like to try updating my graphics drivers in hopes of gaining a better Catalyst featureset and fixing the graphical issues, but according to the version numbers, what I've got installed is already the latest version fom HP. Should I try installing the same version again in case it's somehow corrupted?
Speaking of that old laptop, by the way, its audio is superior and audio controls in the drivers far more complete. This new laptop has terrible sound quality, and I want to get rid of the volume clipping/limiting/whatever and annoying Beats Audio equalizer. Hence, issue two.
Right now, it has a Beats-packaged RealTek driver. The audio sounds horrible under any settings, and turning off Beats produces sound so subpar it's like listening to a cheap pair of headphones while there's a ton of ambient noise. In fact, it's so imbalanced when I turn off Beatd Audio that instead of enhancing the bass as they do with literally any other device, my headphones barely manage to produce flat-sounding audio when attached to this computer. (Speaking of, instead of recognizing the audio jack and reacting to headphones being plugged in properly, it makes the sound louder through headphones than the speakers. I found this out the painful way.)
What I'd love to do is completely abolish the current drivers and install a non-Beats variety of the RealTek drivers. Is this possible? If so, how and where to I find them? And how do I uninstall the old drivers to install the new ones? I need to preserve the ability to use Stereo Mix and the function buttons on my keyboard which control volume; I know that simply letting default drivers take over can destroy both of these things.
I hope you guys (and/or gals) can help, and thanks in advance just for reading all of this.
Edited: I was able to follow the instructions here to enable the default Windows drivers, but that led to my headphones and speakers not being swapped out automatically. Googling led me to the realization that Windows' default drivers aren't equipped to handle that... and then led me to the RealTek drivers site. I downloaded the 64-bit version for Windows 8.1 from here and installed it. Though I had to manually show and enable Stereo Mix, I have it back.
The downside: My speakers and headphones are not recognized as separate entities. They do swap out automatically and no longer have the 'headphones are three times as loud' issue, so I can live with this if I must, but it feels wrong and leaves me worrying if I ever choose to use a headset it won't work. I also don't have an 'enhancement' tab in the device properties for my speakers. I've googled about that and can't come up with a solid answer one way or the other as to whether it's supposed to be there or not with modern RealTek drivers.
What I do still have the most concern about, however, is audio limiting and leveling, neither of which I want. Since there's no 'enhancement' tab and the 'advanced' tab is basically a joke, there's no way for me to be certain these features didn't linger from the stock drivers with Beats Audio enabled. I listened to a video on youtube I'm super familiar with, and when the song's supposed to build up and get louder... it left me underwhelmed and didn't get louder at all, and the perceived volume keeps fluctuating in nasty ways. I'm about at my wit's end with this mess! Someone please help. Lead me to the registry keys to disable the godawful limiting and leveling that's apparently left over from the Beats Audio inclusive drivers (it's the RealTek version; sadly the only thing google turned up was the registry entries for the IDT version), please. I can't deal with this nastiness.
Another edit: Turns out I'd disabled the realtek audio manager in startup during other attempts to get rid of Beats. After re-enabling the manager, Beats is back! I'm tempted to uninstall the program from my start screen and see what happens, at this point; apparently a lot of the problem here is that the bleeping thing is overwriting the real Realtek Audio Manager. And apparently it's not part of the driver installation, or the vanilla RealTek drivers would have overwritten it. What the...?! I just want the Beats Audio gone and a real, genuine RealTek driver and RealTek Audio Manager. This should not be so bleeding difficult! Someone help, please? I couldn't find anywhere to download the real RealTek Audio Manager.
Edited by devilbear, 12 February 2015 - 10:53 PM.