General: Drivers for Branded Laptops

I thought you guys and girls might be able to benefit from something I found recently. I don't usually share things that are just a web search away but this is something I've been searching for for a couple of years.

For a long time I've been struggling by with the Toshiba provided drivers for my AMD/ATI graphics chipset dating from 2008. I understand that Toshiba didn't sign up with AMD for driver support. When trying to install newer drivers from AMD's website the installer told me to contact Toshiba for newer drivers.

I found this thread where somebody has posted a link to a driver installer that doesn't seem to care that I have a Toshiba machine. Obviously installing software downloaded from a file-sharing site is a stupid thing to do but with no updates coming from Toshiba I had little choice. I took all the precautions I could so I shouldn't be part of a bot-net now.

Whilst not making a big difference in games, the older drivers lacked support for certain types of GPU acceleration. As a result, when running Firefox 4 with the new drivers, my laptop feels much much faster and can now use WebGL sites and hardware accelerated Flash. Windows' Aero interface has also felt a big boost.

Eighteen months after I bought it my $450 drug-store laptop now seems like a bargain rather than something I should have spent more on.

Slightly off topic I've just bought 4 gigs of RAM* despite the laptop running 32bit Windows and I'm interested to see if the shared video memory comes from the 1 gig that Windows can't address. Windows currently reports 894MB total video memory with 256MB being dedicated and 638MB being shared. From what I have read the 256MB is allocated by the bios and the 638MB is allocated by Windows as needed but I'm not sure. If that's true I should have saved my money and just upgraded to 3 gigs. I'll find out when the RAM is delivered I guess.

*Well done to Toshiba for filling up both slots with 1 gig sticks - morons.