Only through HP, they will only exchange one for one for a faulty card, the people in tech support can't help you with upgrades, even though you theoretically could up to a 9300m GS or a 9600m GS as they are offered in other machines in the TS lineup and are selectable upgrades when building your own TS on HP's websales page. The video upgrade to a 9600M GT/512 that I bought from a guy in Singapore is the only upgrade so far that I have not had success with, and now I am looking at selling it on ebay. The problem is finding and flashing a bios file to the video card that the HP motherboards' bios will allow to pass post at boot time. I just haven't had any success so far with it, all I get is a white flash followed by a blank screen. It's really a shame that the part of the TS that is hybrid with notebook tech is in the motherboard and the video card interface. That keeps it out of the hands of the enthusiast who may want to up the graphics for some reason after the purchase. The laptop manufacturers have a tight grip on the technology, and pretty much the cards themselves, since the only places to buy them are on ebay and a handful of uber-tech laptop geek forums. Too bad, Apple and Packard Bell tried that proprietary approach, and look where they are and have always been in sales. The only reason for a recent upsurge in Apple sales is due wholly to the disappointment that is Vista and it's well known reputation for shaky reliability and incompatibility.
Hope this helps, maybe you can talk tech support into an upgrade, but good luck trying. They will likely send you an intel card to replace the one you have that went bad, and may not trust you to put it in, and ask you to ship it in to be serviced. Let us all know how it goes.
Good luck to you,
Dave
Im having a problem with my video card in my TouchSmart IQ524. Is the video card upgradable?
Upgrading the Video Card in the 524 or 526 seems to be a waste of time. Unfortunately the drivers that are available for the 9600m GS do not work as WAIVERIDER mentioned. I've tried different ones and it's a waste of time.
It's not the drivers, it's the video bios file/firmware file that has to be loaded "blind", meaning it has to be loaded without the benefit of being able to see anything on screen, with a batch file from bootup, and the new bios file that has to comply with the status output parameters of what the HP computer bios expects from the video card. The drivers don't come into play until you enter the windows gui, and the video card loads it's own vesa2/vga driver from firmware to display the dos environment video we see as windows loads. If HP were to release bios files as files, and not part of a Microsoft-style update battery online, it would be possible to merely download the file, write a batch file to load it, and install the card, then run the firmware CD at bootup, and restart the PC with the newly flashed video card. A lot of what makes this so frustrating for me is the time it takes to pull the TS apart, install the card, test your latest theory, and put the original card back in after the theory fails, and re-assemble before my wife gets up at 4am and wants to check her emails before work. I now have an old laptop that we used for years before the TS that has all her stuff on it so she can use that when the TS is in pieces the next morning when she gets up. In this way, I can do extensive "mad science" and still get SOME sleep.
Dave
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