HP DV9500T video card dead?

Hello All,

I bought this hp dv9500t laptop in oct, 2007 and is now out of warranty.

I have updated Vista to SP1. Yesterday, I was playing a song in windows media player while the lid was kept closed. Suddenly, the song went into trrrrr like sound and the machine rebooted on its own. After having rebooted on its own, the display went into lowest bit depth (6 bit/600x480!), I had to manually change it to 32 bit / 1680x1050. Then to my shock, I found, the video adapter was not Nvidia and it defaulted to default generic VGA driver in display properties.

Later I tried reinstalling the nvidia driver and even upgraded it to latest from laptopvideo2go site. But nothing solves the issue, it never identifies any nvidia display driver.

Looks like the display card got corrupted after upgrade to sp1.

What options do I have now? How much will it cost me to get the video card replaced, if it is determined that the card is corrupted? I am in India now, so I am clueless where I need to send this machine to get serviced?

Please help me!

 

Its not a hardware problem, well i dont think so anyway. You cannot replace the video card only the whole system board.

Display cards do not get damaged by software. When you upgraded to SP1 via windows update did you let tick the Video driver update too? Windows update have been known in the past to installing the wrong drivers.

Try the following first

 

Flipfire,

I did all that you told but the problem is not yet gone. Moreover, I just noticed that during the boot screen, I see small dots in a pattern (like those we see if we set the bit depth too low), moreover all the letters on text during booting are a bit malformed like lightly eaten away.

And every time the OS boots into low bit depth and low resolution which I manually have to set to high. Occasionally the boot screen halts and freezes after the Vista boot progress bar finishes showing, at which point I won't have choice but to restart the machine.

Looks like all of these are symptoms of a corrupt card?

 

Ahh i see, well then yes.

If its showing corruption before windows loads then its highly likely a hardware issue.

To completely rule out a hardware issue, you will need to do a recovery or clean install. Its hard to believe a software update did this.

If you have any Linux live cds or such, you can use that instead.

 

I am now really frustrated, I can't make this machine sleep or hibernate as those options are now disabled. If I shutdown the machine and later start it, it won't start for 2-3 time, even if it starts it reboots. Finally it will boot into ugly looking low bit and low resolution, which I then have to manually change.

Also the nVidia 8600M GS adapter always shows with a yellow exclamation in the device driver list.

Looks like I need completely disable the nvidia driver, to even sensibly boot into my system.

I now regret why I went for a good configuration, if the machine were to fail on something like a graphics card which can't be replaced with replacing the whole mobo.

Any idea how much it costs to replace a notebook mother board for dv9500t? Or should I salvage the memory, harddisks for a new notebook?

 

I also did a clean install with Vista 64 retail and then installed the nvidia driver - the driver still doesn't get identified in display properties.

I even installed xp 64 with corresponding nvidia driver - still the same problem.

I am now increasingly feeling that this a video card gone dead.

Could anyone please tell me what options do I have now?

 

If any one faces issues with 8600M GS graphics card, please report them to this thread given below! I hope, hp and nVidia would eventually accept their botch up and will agree to a free service, somewhere in near future...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=296979