HP DV6T display driver crashes excessively

I have a two month old HP dv6t qe and recently I will often get a message saying that my display driver has crashed and recovered, and then seconds later I'll get a blue screen, requiring me to manually shut down the laptop.

I've tried updating the graphics driver from amd's website but I always get an error message saying that the updated driver "cannot be downloaded due to incompatible hardware/software on your computer. The version of your graphics adapter is not supported. Please contact your notebook manufacturer for a graphics driver update."

Can anybody please help? Thanks in advance

 

Have you tried to completely remove your old drivers before installing the new ones. Or just removing your current drivers and reinstalling them? If you don't completely remove the driver it can cause problems.

 

Contact HP (haha) and see if you can send it in. If you don't want to do that then try running it on the intel chip and see if that works. That is only a temporary fix but at least your laptop will be usable.

 

Download the 11.8 drivers from this link: http://www2.ati.com/drivers/mobile/11-8_mobility_vista_win7_32-64_ccc.exe.

People on this board say to choose "custom installation" and only install the ATI display driver but, for me anyway, I've had better luck just updating everything.

Of course if you have any issues you can always do a system restore.

 

I'm one of those on this forum who resists installing anything on top of the HP supplied driver set for switchable graphics, unless of course there is a compelling reason to do otherwise. Most of the graphics related problems I've encountered on this board have been associated with non-HP drivers. but maybe I'm not up to speed on the latest...

if these ati drivers are known to work better than the HP set, and this has been validated, then that would be important to know. But the first approach should be to test the HP-supplied configuration, even if it means an image restore. once you install something and then try to uninstall, even with drivesweeper or similar tools, you're asking for trouble. especially graphics.

you can do a clean HP restore (minimal image), then download and install the latest package from HP

make sure your BIOS is F.1A, configure to fixed graphics and control everything from CCC

 

I just so happen to be one of those whos' dv6 responded quite well to installing the v11.8 driver/CCC package (the complete install) directly over the default v11.4 HP driver/CCC package that originally shipped with the notebook. No issues to report and I have had far fewer BSoD's than I had when using the OEM driver set. Occassionally, I do run into an issue where an HD video will crash my system but other than that...

Now that isn't to say that every time I have upgraded to the next "latest-greatest" release of a driver, that it has been all sunshine and giggles with this notebook. Hell - I found out the hard way, that it is far from the truth by upgrading my bluetooth and audio drivers. Had to do some expiramenting with some of those releases to find something stable. And of what I did go with, it was always something found directly off of the HP support page for my specific model. Mind you that not all of the driver packages posted here at NBR are those released by HP. Some are linked directly from the hardware manufacturer. Not sure that I agree with the ideaology behind the reasoning, but hey - it's all good, I'm sure.

Point being that, IMO, the latest-greatest drivers aren't always the best solution. In theory, I suppose they should be, but the world is a crazy place so it's probably better to find something that works and stick with it. HP placed their name on specific releases for good reason. I would imagine that it is a best practice to look in their camp first before venturing out beyond the boundary of what they test/certify as OK.

 

right-o Izagaia good info, and great to know that you have acheived improvement. My question is this: When you folks have trouble with BSoD's and other happiness with the HP image and latest HP downloads, what does HP say and have you tried to utilize the support process? worst case HP will say its the app's fault... but if the notebook is under warranty I'd want to know what HP says.

that aside, the reason why the hp drivers always lag the OE drivers is because HP has to test them before making them available. there could even be a dialog between HP and the OE in some cases, producing a driver specific to HP that is not available on the OE site.

this is not to say that 11.8 won't make it to the HP site. maybe it will! its great to see some improvement at least, so that suggests that 11.8 might get blessed in the future or even tweeked for HP and appear as 11.8.000.A000.1 or something equally silly