Do I need to take out my laptop's graphics card?
Do I need to take out my laptop's graphics card?
I own an HP ProBook 4720s that used to overheat but now won't turn on at all. I am sure the graphics card is broken, specifically a faulty ATI Radeon part. If I take out that bad GPU and its memory, will my computer work with just the built-in graphics? Also, do I need to reset the BIOS settings for this?
You have a CPU with built-in pictures or a CPU without any pictures. Please tell me which one you use so I can help more specifically.
That CPU has an IGP built in, but we don't know if that's connected to your screen. In modern laptops, the integrated graphics card usually takes over when the separate GPU chip isn't working (like on mining-only cards), so it draws power from the battery and shows the picture instead of the main chip sending it to the display. That's how you can mine without a dedicated graphics card anymore for gaming. However, your laptop is 13 years old now, which might mean things worked differently back then if only specific driver settings allowed the separate GPU to run. You probably had to install drivers in a certain order to get that chip working. Back when this was common, it would be easy just to lift the power wires of the old chip up a bit and see if it lit up. But newer chips use BGA technology, so you'd need to take out the entire chip. In any case, you don't really need to worry about leaving the memory in place because nothing happens without the main graphics card anyway. Think of it this way: if removing the chip stops everything from working, then fixing the old one is just as easy as swapping a brand new one down. So just go ahead and do that replacement, and it should work perfectly fine.