Help.. Elitebook 8460p making Artifacts only after installing Graphics driver

[nt32]

Hello

I'm having some problems getting my graphics drivers working & was hoping to get some help or advice it's not broken.

A few days ago my laptop slipped and fell about 2 foot onto its base. Unfortunately the old style hard drive was badly damaged so I bought a new SSD to replace it, A Partiot Burst 480GB sata 3.

I installed clean windows 7 ultimate on it & everything was perfect and super fast. System drivers installed and worked no problems, I could browse the internet and play media quickly but the graphics driver seemed to have a major problem. 

Every time I attempted to install an AMD driver, the laptop would finish installing and restart but when it booted there was a mess of graphical artifacts everywhere. Some icons would change as you hovered your mouse over them sometimes appearing normal then going back but everything worked perfectly in the background. You could go into the menu's if you knew where to click or had a reference on another pc

I tried many things to get it to work without artifacts or to scan my graphics chip. All the scanning and spec software couldn't read it or regard it as a standard VGA display driver, even DXdiag. I'm guessing its damaged.

I've installed multiple versions old and new of catalyst control / crimson / adrenalin, none working. It wont let me install the Intel ones. I've switched my display to a desktop monitor and installed, no luck. I've fished around in the mess to open up and change the resolution and try 40Hz and 60hz none of which helped. I've tried reinstalling windows, only installing my wireless card driver then immediately going for the graphics driver. Same deal. I tried unpacking the graphics driver with 7 zip and manually installing from device manager. Same outcome. I've also tried it on home premium, having to use system restores every attempt.

It's really frustrating because I'm pretty much locked out of all 3d applications unless I want to play them blind & between this + very slow data recovery on my old hard drive, I'm getting nowhere very quickly.

Also, it's kind of unusual how everything aside 3d programs is working perfectly with the standard VGA.

Is there any work around or way to fix this that I missed? It would be a shame to lose functionality of such an excellent laptop

Any help of advice would be appreciated, even if its just to a slightly better standard graphics accelerator than what came with the windows installation

Thanks

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I'm using the laptop from the mains, not battery and I have turned off the screen dimming and set the power options to high. I'm limited in options there without the driver, cant even adjust brightness

[nt32]

I noticed that there are Firmwire drivers for different SSD' models. None of them work for me

Is it possible that my Patriot ssd  needs its own new driver to get the gpu working or would that not effect gpu drivers in the first place? 

Is there a way to clear or reset corrupted video memory? Youtube's media player was on at the time of the fall.

Clutching at straws here but the laptop working very well without using 3d programs