T400 Cannot switch to energy saving graphics

I have not been able to switch to energy saving graphics for some reason.
I keep getting the following message.
"System cannot enable Energy-Saving Graphics
Close any 3D or video applications and disconnect external displays. Then switch graphic processors."
I've used dual monitors before, and played games before, and I've switched back and for from "Energy Saving" and "High performance" before, but it seems I can no longer do it.
I don't have anything open, and I am using 1 monitor. I even made sure that pressing "Fn+F7" it shows "Computer only".
I don't know what to do cause it's eating at my battery life when I don't even need the dedicated graphics right now. But I don't want to turn it off in the bios completely, because I need it sometimes

Have the opposite problem - not able to switch to high performance. Interested to see if the answer to this will shed light over the issue. Out of curiosity, none of you guys have a crucial m4 ssd drive installed that you've been firmware-upgrading over the past few days?

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T500 Switchable Grapics - System Cannot enable Energy Saving Graphics

"Close any 3D or video applications and disconnect external displays"
There are no 3D or video application running and no external displays connected or otherwise. This started happened after we installed "Star Wars Old Kingdom' ... so we uninstalled it and even after several restarts still getting this error.
How can we see what 3D or video proceses this module is detecting so that we can turn it off, or delete it?

Hi slanotran,
Have you updated your Chipset, Display , Graphics and Video drivers?
Also, try deleting you current drivers and installing them manually.
If the latest drivers don't pan out try the previous driver versions.
And can you go into BIOS and make sure your settings match these:
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T400, cannot start Catalyst Control Center - error "active GPU not supported"

on a t400 machine running vista business 64 bit.
last week all was hunky dory. this week, when i try to open my ati catalyst control center (CCC), i receive the following error:
"ATI catalyst control center cannot be started because the currently active gpu is not supported"
i've read some posts about this problem stemming from not using the ATI graphics card and rather being on the integrated graphics card. the posts indicated i could reenable CCC simply by clicking on the battery icon in the system tray and selecting "high performance mode" to force the machine to use the discrete graphics card. after i do this, and then try to start CCC, i receive the same error as above. also, at this point after the switch to high peformance mode, my device manager lists "mobile intel(r) 4 series express chipset family" as my display adapter still. if i left or right click on the battery icon in the tray, i do not see any options for switching cards explicitly.
the video driver for the mobile intel 4 adapter is listed as being from ATI at version 8.520.4.4000.
i am not sure of my driver version for the ATI card. nor do i know where to look for it.
to my knowledge, nothing aside from a number of "critical" windows updates have changed on my system between the time CCC was working last week and now.
any suggestions as to how to fix this? and what caused it to stop working?
thanks in advance for any help.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

i finally figured it out. and no new drivers or reinstalls were necessary. in the end, all i needed to do was turn on the lenovo version of the power manager (which appears in my taskbar as a horizontal green battery with the number of minutes of use remaining). from there i can left click and get to the menu that has the switchable graphics option where i can chose energy saving or high performance. if from there i select high performance, i can then open CCC.
the important thing to note from this is in order to get to this menu you have to be using LENOVO's thinkVantage power management program (which sticks the green battery icon on your task bar), NOT windows built in power manager, which appears as a vertical grey/blue/? battery in the system tray (at least on mine). once you have that on, you can explicitly switch the graphics cards.
the odd thing is, i'd been accessing CCC without explicitly switching cards with no problem up to last week. so somehow the default setting must of gone from high performance to energy saving, thus putting me on the integrated graphics card unless i switched it manually. weird.
slip, thanks for you help. i appreciate it. and that is an interesting note about freeing up more memory by disabling the switchable graphics. i will probably give this a shot and see how i like. more available memory never hurts!
thanks again to everybody that helped out.

Yet another temporary freezing problem, energy saving related, maybe

I've followed uncountable suggestions about this issue, but none seem to be quite the same situation, and none of the suggestions I tried made any difference so far.
History: MBP 17" June/2009, 8GB RAM, 500GB Seagate with sudden movement protection, started life as 10.5.7, done at least three fresh reinstalls of SL. The problem was present on the second SL install (the one I really used in production for about a year), but I solved it somehow by following uncountable Google suggestions at the time. Didn't take not of the magic one, because the problem wasn't so predictable at the time, or I didn't know enough about it, and also because I only noticed the problem was gone after a couple of weeks of normal use. Unfortunately, some time ago my filesystem went nuts on a kernel panic and, though I was able to move things back in place from lost+found, a few things wouldn't work as they should, so I went for another fresh reinstall. After I started to use the new system the problem showed up again, but I haven't being able to find a fix for it again. Current system (10.6.4) and patches regularly updated, though I tend to delay a reboot to avoid putting together all my usual windows/applications in the correct desktop/spaces. Maybe the only continuously running extension I have is Growl, since I tend to more heavily use the Unix part of the Mac through MacPorts (latex, tcpdump, nmap, bash scripts, emacs and so on). Recently I installed M$ Office, but normally I prefer OpenOffice (does M$ Office install some sort of extension?)
Frequency: I'm almost sure it is triggered by something related to energy saving regarding turning off the screen, but it doesn't happen every time. When I'm giving a class, the machine runs on battery, the settings for screen off are shorter and if I take too long to generate some input (key press or touchpad action), the problem tends to happen. Interestingly, it's particularly more frequent when I'm giving classes:-):-), but it is happening even on my desk with power on. I'm inclined to think there's a "window of opportunity" for the bug to happen, maybe between screen dim and screen off (a few minutes?). My settings are currently at 15 minutes for the screen to go off, for both power adaptor and battery operation, but that's an attempt to lower the chances of this happening during class, which is terrible. They used to be at only a few minutes of inactivity.
Symptoms: if I try to do anything with the machine past some period of inactivity, maybe during that window I mentioned above, there's a high chance of the bug being triggered. The system responds quickly to clicking a window, but applications don't seem to receive the focus of attention; I notice that the window frame of an application doesn't get darker when I try to select it. On a Terminal, the prompt remains as a rectangular frame instead of a filled block (I use white characters on dark background), and no matter how much I try, I cannot give the focus of attention to the visible shell on Terminal, so I can't issue any shell command to try and find out things. Changing workspaces may happen, but at a very slow speed, maybe many seconds after issueing the command. Eventually the system recovers itself, usually after several minutes, and then all user interface events that I tried during the freeze were remembered and are played sequently as fast as the machine can handle, sometimes doing unwanted things in the process due to objects receiving the wrong action (some sort of desynchronization). The outstanding event that preceeds recovering is the screen being progressively blackened and then lit again, but not instantly as in moving the pointer to a hot corner. The screen transition happens during half to a full second, after which all queued events are played at the fastest possible speed. After that the system is completely normal. In the beginning I have hard-rebooted the machine, because I didn't know it would eventually recover itself. During class I also don't have the patience to wait for long (and neither do students:-)).
Solutions already tried:
- disabling sms through pmset. I know it has to be disabled with this particular drive, otherwise conflicts with the drive's own mechanism. It is currently off, and had been on for a while till I refound the suggestion through google.
- re-indexing Spotlight's DB. No change.
- fixing file permissions (I don't see any possible relation, but anyway...)
Don't recall what else is missing on this list, because I couldn't find a concrete suggestion for this scenario, so I believe that's about it.
It looks to be more frequent now, to the point that I decided to stop work just to write this long msg, in the hope that someone else may have seen such behaviour and have something new for me to try.
Thanks in advance.

The problem is that the initial backup is incredibly slow and hasn't worked yet. I right click on the dock icon and start the backup process which after working out what needs to be copied progress's in very slow erratic bursts.
It's hard to offer a definite solution. But there are some simple things you could try to improve the backup speed such as excluding TM backup disk from spotlight indexing (privacy tab in spotlight prefs), and excluding unecessary files and folder from the backup (e.g. applications) in TM prefs.

DVD Studio Pro overriding Energy Saving Settings - Screen always on

Hello
I am a bit upset about DVD Studio Pro overriding the energy saving settings. It means if you do a serious render you will find yourself with the monitor on for hours and days. On the Imacs you can't even fully dim down the screen to switch it of manually.
I know about the possibility to do a background render. But it doesn't make sense to me that DVD Studio keeps the screen on. I don't see why I have to go crooked ways to have something very normal.
There is no need for DVD studio behaving like this, it only raises energy consumption unnecessarily.
I hope Apple will fix this or explain in reasonable ways why it does like this.
And is there maybe a way to hack DVD Studio in a way it doesn't behave like this, apart from doing the background render?
Thanks
Message was edited by: padre999

A common way to solve it is to download and install the proapplications support file:
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/proapplicationsupport31macosx104.html
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I Can't Switch between 'power-saving GPU' and 'High-Performance GPU' in Catalyst Control Center

Hi,
Whatever if my computer was only on the battery or was only plugged in to the main power supply. In Catalyst Control Center, I noticed that 'High-Performance GPU' was always selected', although the 'automatically select power-saving GPU when on battery' was enabled. Also, When I tried to switch into the 'power-saving GPU', there was no response at all. However, when my laptop was only on the battery, I noticed the the try of switching into 'Power-Saving GPU' results in shutting down my computer suddenly.
Thus, I had to open the Device Manager, then I disabled 'Radeon HD'. After that, 'power-Saving GPU' was selected(Screen shot below), regardless of whether my laptop was on only the battery or was only plugged in to the main power supply. To switch it into 'High-performance GPU' again, I only must enable 'Radeon HD' in the Device Manager since clicking on 'High-performance GPU' in the Catalyst Control Center didn't respond.
As conclusion, 'High-performance GPU is always selected, regardless of whether my computer was only the Battery, or was only plugged in to the main power supply. To let 'power-saving GPU' is selected, then 'Radeon HD' must be disabled in the Device Manager.

Hi @cooperator ,
Welcome to the HP Forums!
It is a terrific place to find answers.
For you to have the best experience in the HP forum I would like to direct your attention to the HP Forums Guide Learn How to Post and More
I see from your post that you have switchable graphics and are experiencing a difficulty with them.
Have you checked your power plan. Here is a link to Using the HP Power Plan Utility.
Here are two documents on switchable graphics that should also assist you.
Overview of Switchable Graphics or Dual GPUs
Switchable Graphics on Notebooks Configured with Dual AMD GPUs
If you are still having an issue, I suggest contacting HP support for further assistance.
Please call our technical support at 800-474-6836. If you live outside of the US/Canada Region, please click the link below to get the support number for your region. Phone Assist Worldwide
Sparkles1
I work on behalf of HP
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
Click the “Kudos, Thumbs Up" on the bottom right to say “Thanks” for helping!

Can i set different energy saving preferences for different accounts?

Hi,
I have bought an Mbox for my iMac. Its instructions for installation include disabling the energy saving features in Preferences.
However, I also want to use the machine for many other purposes and would prefer to have energy saving activated.
I set up a new account but it seems that energy saving preferences can't be different between different users on the machine? Is that true?
I have tried unlocking and locking after making the change and switching between accounts (both admin accounts at present)
imac Mac OS X (10.4.7) c2d, 2GB
imac Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Niel,
When i entered the syntax exactly as you recommended, and as provided as example code within the general commands manual for PMSET ie
do shell script pmset - a displaysleep 0 disksleep 0 sleep 0 password
"password" with administrator privileges
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By inserting carriage returns to spread the command over lines, and adding brackets around the minutes, I got increasing acceptance of the script, up to the following point
do shell script pmset - a
displaysleep(0)
disksleep(0)
sleep(0)
password
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privileges
at which point it said "The variable pmset is not defined."
Can you suggest where I am getting stuck? Is something missing?
Late news: A friend of mine found script on line which seemed to suggest that the following would be the format
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with administrator privileges
However, when i try to compile or run that it says:
Expected “timeout” or “transaction” but found identifier
and it highlights the word [administrator]
If you can see where i am going wrong I'd love to hear from you.
david

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T400 Cannot switch to energy saving graphics

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