I got the Skyrim Legendary Edition off the Steam store today. Since I own the game on Xbox i was excited to begin my PC career with a game that I already love and can proceed to mod the #$@^ out of for fun. Anyway, upon starting the game up I noticed some frame rate issues. I expected some as I'm playing with a Dell Inspiron 7520. It does have 8gb of ram and a Radeon HD 7730m graphics card, along with an Intel HD Graphics 4000 for battery saving. I was fine with the low frame rate until i noticed in the settings it was only using the Intel graphics card. I quickly tried to change it to the Radeon but it was not even listed. Since then I have updated the drivers for the Radeon, but that somehow made it much, much worse. I then uninstalled the Radeon drivers completely and I started the game up with the same frame rate as the first time I played it. I am now convinced the game was never using the full ability of my laptop and would like to know how I am supposed to get Skyrim to use the Radeon instead of the Intel. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

First thing to try is to set the power settings so it never goes into low power mode for when you are plugged in. The game starts out in 2D, so the system says, OK, the CPU graphics can handle it. It never switches over.

If you have any software that is supposed to manage this on top of the power saving options, then disable that from start up, or even uninstall it.