Black screen with Catalyst > 13.4 on Asus N71jq and similar

If you own an Asus N71jq or a similar laptop model from 5 years ago you probably tried to update your Catalys drivers to something more recent. Official Asus support page only provides an ancient version from 2010. If you try to use the official and latest AMD drivers you will end up with a black screen during the installation process.

After a lot of digging on Google I found out that this is a widespread problem and the last driver from AMD that still work turns out to be 13.4, which is not ideal, but still better than what Asus provides. Sometimes after that apparently the back lighting of the screen is broken. Source.

Finding 13.4 drivers is a challenge. Guru3D used to have all versions listed on their websites, but AMD blocked external linking some time ago, so all links are a dead end. You also can't find 13.4 in AMD driver archives. So after scouring the internet, I finally found a working version. I am attaching it to this post for your leisure.

Download

Cen
GitHub
Eurobattle.net
Lagabuse.com
Bnetdocs