Getting vga_switcheroo with ATI Mobility Radeon 5650 HD to work

I think that I found the solution, we are on the same page, please look this comment:

Found the problem. As mentioned in other sites, vga_switcheroo will magically disappear if you have the proprietary Radeon driver installed. This driver is called fglrx. So if Synaptic shows that you have fglrx on your machine, uninstall it and reboot - et voila, vga_switcheroo returns.

This might help!

cheers!

You have to use the open source graphics drivers see http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Features . I have managed to switch between the cards on my laptop using the switchroo patch with the open source dirvers. It simply will not work with the AMD ATI proprietary fglrx drivers. However, the 5650 performance was really poor - I am starting to think it used the VESA drivers – interested to see if you could get it to work.

I am attempting to squeeze as much out of the integrated ATI 4200 as possible at the moment.