HP laptop problem

[Agelastus]

I have a problem with the laptop of a member of my family.

This laptop is mostly used for games. A couple of weeks ago it had an instance where the display driver failed and had to be rebooted. This happened a couple of times since. Then, on Thursday night, it did this three times in a row. It was fine on Friday morning, but during the afternoon the display driver failed and recovered three times in quick succession. Ran a full scandisk on all drives (took hours) and tried again. Now the game crashed out causing an auto shutdown repeatedly!!! When restarted later, Windows "found a solution" - out of date drivers for the Nvidia graphics card. Installed the updated ones. Now every game played crashes out, mostly causing an auto-shutdown, within a few minutes. This has been tested with several games.

So, to the experts, is this?

(a) Badly installed drivers.

or, as I fear,

(b) A failing graphics card.

or

(c) Something else I haven't thought of?

Do you have any ideas gentlemen?

[Cerr]

Sounds like the graphics card is failing but try uninstalling the current driver and install the old driver (the one that was installed when you got the laptop first). See if that helps at all.

[derspiess]

As always, I recommend the sledgehammer approach.  Backup your data & reinstall the OS.  Use the recovery disk if you have to, but get rid of HP's crapware.  You'll have a nice, clean error-free OS to work with, or will at least be able to confirm a hardware issue.

[DontSayBanana]

It's an nVidia... what's the chipset?

Also, try booting in safe mode first.  Safe mode only enables VGA display, so if that crashes, odds are good that the IGP is failing.

EDIT: Also wondering what the laptop model is; apparently, some Pavilions had problems with defective nVidia IGPs: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163918/hp_still_getting_heat_on_nvidia_graphics_chips.html

[Agelastus]

It's an nVidia... what's the chipset?

Also, try booting in safe mode first.  Safe mode only enables VGA display, so if that crashes, odds are good that the IGP is failing.

EDIT: Also wondering what the laptop model is; apparently, some Pavilions had problems with defective nVidia IGPs: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163918/hp_still_getting_heat_on_nvidia_graphics_chips.html

Interesting. Very interesting.

Haven't found the exact matching symptoms yet in my trawling of the internet (other than possibly the random beeps) but still...there's something seriously wrong with HP laptops, isn't there?

It's a DV9689ea with a GeForce 8600M GS (although interestingly, the computer seems to think it is a dv9500 - is that normal?)

[DontSayBanana]

Interesting. Very interesting.

Haven't found the exact matching symptoms yet in my trawling of the internet (other than possibly the random beeps) but still...there's something seriously wrong with HP laptops, isn't there?

It's a DV9689ea with a GeForce 8600M GS (although interestingly, the computer seems to think it is a dv9500 - is that normal?)

That's fairly normal- in a product line with a lot of variants, there'll be a standard "platform" reported to the BIOS.  Looking at the recall info, DV9600 wasn't in the recall list, but it goes all the way up to DV94XX, and I'm seeing a lot of accusations that HP lowballed the estimate and that it actually affected more, so it's not unreasonable to believe you're having a similar issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8_Series#Problems

Another thing is what types of games are you playing?  That chipset seems designed to compete with Radeon HD 2000 series... I'm on a Radeon 3100 IGP and Sims 3 is about the most graphics-intensive I can go without major problems (I have to use half-res on Star Trek Online to keep the load down).  If you're playing games way above spec, then yes, you can actually overload the graphics card.

[Agelastus]

Another thing is what types of games are you playing?  That chipset seems designed to compete with Radeon HD 2000 series... I'm on a Radeon 3100 IGP and Sims 3 is about the most graphics-intensive I can go without major problems (I have to use half-res on Star Trek Online to keep the load down).  If you're playing games way above spec, then yes, you can actually overload the graphics card.

Most often played game (say, about 75-80% of the time) is Medieval II: Total War (yes, my mother really loves the Total War games!) Other games have been Rome TW, AoE III, Anno 1404 and a couple of older games that should not have been a problem. As far as I am aware, none of them should be above spec for the machine, but it sounds like you are much more expert in this field than me.

The machine's lasted about 21 months, and she's bought an extended warranty, so I guess I'll see what HP say tomorrow. Just tried installing the latest Bios...with no result. The video driver flashed away after about a minute of game time, then bluescreened and force rebooted the machine.

[Vince]

Sounds like what happened to my hp laptop.  Constant rebooting from a problem with a graphics card (geforce go 7200) that only got worse with time.  Ended up having to send it back to hp to fix it.