If AMD driver is installed the laptop monitor only works with power plugged in.

[jayD12]

This is a bit of an odd one.  When I woke my laptop from sleep the monitor wouldn't come on.  I forced a couple of reboots and still no image on the monitor.  The fans and keyboard lights came on and off as expected. 

• An external monitor works both via HDMI and through a USB docking station which is how I did the rest of the troubleshooting
• The first thing I did was to check the video driver.  HP support assistant indicated it was up to date but I downloaded and installed the newest one anyway with no change.
• Through device manager I uninstalled the device driver and the screen started working again but when device manager automatically reinstalled the AMD driver the screen went black again.
• I called HP support since I'm still under warranty and the first thing they had me do was a BIOS update.  After the update the monitor was working but stopped working when I unplugged the power. At the end of the call they wanted to start a warranty return process that could take 2 weeks but I can't miss two weeks of online classes.
• When I unplugged the power cable the monitor went blank again. When I plug the power back in the monitor comes back on.  I plugged the power in during the BIOS update so I'm not sure if the update did anything or if it was the act of plugging in the power that enabled the monitor.
• My current workaround is to uninstall the device driver and configure windows not to automatically install driver updates.  that's not ideas since the video quality on the default Microsoft video driver is kinda crap and has reduced the refresh rate to 1Hz. Either that or I reinstall the AMD driver and stay plugged in but its a laptop so what's the point of that.  

Any ideas on how I can fix this.  I'd try an older version of the AMD driver but I couldn't find one.