HP dv9000 graphics card problem!

EDIT: Sorry for extremely long post, but I want to give as many details as possible.

The dv9000 is supposed to work with both 18.5V 3.5A AC (65W) and 19.0V 4.74A AC (90W) - you will see that by looking under the battery. It however mainly supports the 19.0V 47.4A input, which is the kind of adapter it ships with.

Last week, my 90W adapter broke. While sending after a new one, I borrowed my sisters' adapter, a 65W one.

I also dropped my computer once around that time, from a height of a third of a meter, maybe. The display took a hit, and a small chink (english is not my first language) opened on the right side of my screen - fixed it easily by just pressing it together again, it made a clicking sound and all was well. The insides might have had a shake as well.

My laptop often gets unusually hot. At times, it can top out at 80 degrees Celsius. It often hangs around 70 degrees. (I do not remember which of the thermometers it was, but the hottest one is around there.)

I was also playing around with ollydbg last week, a live assembly editor, and one or two assemblers. Did not really know what I was doing, caused my computer to shut down once or twice, probably because I did something illegal.

There, some background, so you will be able to perhaps help me understand my problem better.

To the problem. I do not know the exact day it arose. It was maybe the day after I switched the power adapter, maybe two. Did not really use the laptop too much, might just not have noticed the problem. The problem was, however, that patterns started to appear around my mouse cursor. At first. It was maybe 50 pixels in every direction from the mouse cursor. I could still see the cursor, but it was in bad quality. Some cursors, like the waiting cursor, had this problem constantly, whilst the normal mouse cursor had it more seldom. It looked like something was corrupt. I tried uninstalling my graphics drivers. Windows worked fine (but it is certainly not pretty in 640x480.) I tried installing another version of the graphics drivers. (I tried some laptopvideo2go.com drivers. I tried both those and the ones from HP.com. The laptop has a Nvidia 7600 Go card.) The problem was back instantly. And it got worse. The pattern appeared at more places. In the tray, for example - odd patterns, like corrupt images, or wholly black icons. Sometimes patterns over halves of my screen. The computer would hang (and restart.)

I was running vista at this time. Even later, when I restarted, and after the Vista boot screen, the screen was black. It went from a black, but lit screen, to a turned off screen, maybe every fifth second, for 30 seconds. That was Vista trying to get either the graphics card, graphics drivers or display working. After the 30 seconds, Vista showed a bluescreen. It said, "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, and could not be restarted" or something along those lines. (Google nvlddmkm.sys, others have problems with that file as well. Their problems do however arise when they game or put strain on the gfx card. In those cases, it is said to be because of faulty vista drivers.) Memory was dumped to disk, and the OS rebooted. The odd thing was that Vista successfully booted every third time or so I restarted. The corrupt patterns still appeared, though. Any activities requiring the graphics card, such as watching a video in VLC, caused the laptop to hang. The sound would still go on playing, but the screen would hang and eventually the computer would BSOD and restart.

I thought it was a driver problem, or a software problem. I was running Vista 64-bit. So, I downgraded to XP professional 32-bit. At first, it worked fine. I installed graphic card drivers. The problem came back after an hour, maybe. XP does not show any BSOD, but it must be the same problem. After the OS load/boot screen, once the OS is supposed to show the Welcome-screen and presumably load its graphics drivers and whatnot, the screen does what it did in vista, goes from black to lit black and back.

My laptop battery could be faulty. It currently lasts only 15 minutes or so, as opposed to the 60 minutes a year ago. It also says on the battery that it should be kept between 0-60 degrees Celsius, and it has certainly been above that at least once or twice. When I remove the battery, and use only the power chord, (Which has both a lower wattage, lower voltage and lover amperage than the usual input) the problem appears more seldom (HUH?!), but still appears a lot. With only the battery in, and no chord, the problem always appears, at least the corrupt screen one.

From time to time it works wonderfully - mostly surfing the web, that is. I surfed wikipedia for an hour, but once I went to a more graphics intense webpage and at the same time started to install visual studio (very resource-intense installation, darn microsoft ), the corrupt problem appeared around my cursor, randomly all over my screen, the computer hung, and shut down.

That leads me to suspect that it might have something with insufficient power to computer components like the video card. Since my computer often gets so unusually hot, and since resistance goes up a lot (I do remember Ohm's law, but do not know how computers use amperes/volts etcetera) when conductors get hotter, it might have something to do with that. The 65W adapter do not fit perfectly into the power jack on my computer - it should be maybe 3 millimeters further in to make full contact with whatever is in there - which might contribute further to the lack of input power, if that is the problem.

So - what do you think? Is the problem lack of input power? Faulty display? Faulty graphics card? Faulty connection inside my computer? How come it sometimes works, and sometimes not? (It does not make sense to me...) What can a lower wattage/voltage/amperage do with my computer, if anything? While my battery is charging, does the laptop power itself through the chord, or through the battery indirectly? Once the battery is fully charged, does the laptop power itself through the chord, or through the battery indirectly?

Grateful for any help!

 

Damn cant believe you made me read all of that.

I too have experienced nvlddmk.sys BSOD with one of the drivers i tried. My computer is undervolted which means its being fed decreased power so this could be related. I changed my drivers and it went away. The weird mouse pixelling is most likely software related so you can breathe. When i got that nv.sys error, my screen went insane.. it went black and white then eventually BSOD'ed

Sounds like your battery and/or AC adapter isnt putting out enough voltage to power the laptop which gives you a precautionary BSOD. Try a correct spec adapter to begin first then maybe replace your battery. Id put a big bet on the AC adapter not putting out enough power

Laptop 101: Not enough power = Blue screen of joy and insanity

 

Thanks for taking that time. ;D
But the BSOD is due to the same reason on both XP and Vista, whatever the reason is. I am using old drivers, which have worked perfectly fine before, so I would like to be able to exclude that, but one can never be sure.

The only odd thing is my battery. The problem arises both with battery only, and chord only. Does not look good

 

When you said 15mins battery life currently.. Is this before or after your sisters 65w AC adapter?

It could be one of these:

Battery doesnt have enough charge to power laptop because its either dead cells or not charged properly which can lead to..

the 65w AC adapter not giving either the laptop or battery enough power/charge

Try the proper AC cord first. A dv9000 is quite a big laptop.. i dont think a 65w adapter is recommended

I just read from another forum about nv.sys error. It talked about a Power supply unit aswell.. except this is on a desktop..

 

The 90W one will arrive Monday, so we will see. The battery life might have gone down some, might have changed with the adapter...

I am just freaked that my gfx card might be damaged... My warranty went out two months ago, and a repair will probably not be cheap...

Thanks

 

Watts is the measurement of the amount of electrical power drawn by the laptop. Its also calculated by volts x amps = watts. Which leads me back to my first post.. Laptop 101: Not enough power = BSOD regardless of OS. You have a big ass dv9000 which drains alot of power.. even my tiny dv2000 comes with a 90w adapter

You can breathe as its most likely software side issues and no gfx card damage. If you think the mouse pixels scared you. My screen was flashing black and white insanely that it was gonna give me an epileptic seizure...

 

fireflip is right it was when you put a lower psu on your laptop. never undervolt copmuters period. it can catch on fire. there is really no fix for this except to send it in.


metaphor: it was just like the xbox 360 when you put a cooler in the back it did more damge then before because it suck power from the psu making less power for the xbox causing it to burn out the motherboard. it a good thing the laptop

 

My new adapter just arrived. (a little late)
Will reboot and then install the recommended graphics drivers again.
Thanks for all your help, and -

Pray for me!

EDIT: A flashing screen would have given me an instant heart attack!

Dondadah: With "it a good thing the laptop", do you mean "it isn't a good thing for the laptop"?

I have heard about undervolting before in this forum. Is there a difference between this and undervolting? Why do one undervolt?

 

Removed on request.

 

Very interesting.
I have exactly the same problem you described, on a HP DV9051EA (european laptop shipped in France). Exactly the same thing ... I should have use the same words ...
Now here's the only difference : i did not change the ac adapter, like you the problem arise quite suddenly, as I was loading a game.
The problem occured with Ubuntu installed. Not related though. As for the ac adapter from my experience. So I'm not really sure what the problem is, but as you suggest, it could be related to the heat and power charge for the graphic card, as I can experienced it too.
Now at least I know I'm not alone with this. I've searched for month for this problem.

 

Check if your notebooks are in the Recall page, if it is then you are entitled for a free repair even if your original warranty has expired.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&docname=c01087277

 

I have a very similar problem... was in the middle of my game when my dv9010tx gave me the all familiar "nvlddmkm.sys has stopped responding and has recovered" [VISTA ERROR] and then I saw were the Icons disappearing and the BSOD and finally blacked out...

First some background:
Bought my Laptop in Jan 2007... Was in love with it till a couple of weeks ago. My warranty expired in Jan 2008 and I had recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate [followed the steps listed out on the HP site...] from my Windows MCE...

Now she is in a coma... She wont start up and all i see is a alternating Grey and white vertical strips on the screen. The most insane bit is that the HP service center is charging me approx 785 USD [33000 INR] to fix the issue...

Heart broken and totally dejected... Dont want to pay that much for a fix... I am not even sure that they identified the problem correctly... after a couple of weeks sleepless nights... Looking to you guys for a possible resolution...

Any pointers would be very helpful... :cry: :cry:

 

I just went through this:

Notebook screen went dim, I noticed a small windows pop up near the clock indicating that a driver had failed. Before I could read the whole thing, my screen went WHITE!! (Blank). Reboot and nothing. Safe mode, nothing. BIOS and nothing.

I hooked up a VGA monitor, saw the start up stuff, but once it tried to start windows, nothing on the external monitor. Safe mode was OK, but is was almost like CGA graphics. Cyan, Magenta, etc. Horrible.

I called Tech Support and shipped the laptop off. A week later it came back and they had replaced the mother board.

Oh yeah, it left with 2Gb of RAM, came back with 1 Gb or RAM. Holy crap is this thing SLOW. If anyone has 1G of ram, get an upgrade.

I called HP to tell them, was put on hold, and am not waiting for a callback. There is no way I am shipping this thing back for RAM.

UGH!

 

sounds like your VGA is dying, but that nvlddmk.sys error is usually a driver issue. Ive experienced it before.

if your having booting problems try doing this.

-Take out battery pack and unplug AC power

-Hold the power button for 30 seconds or more

-Only plug in the AC power this time and try starting up again

 

Thanks oblio98 and flipfire for your inputs...

What i missed out to mention in my previous post.... The Service center folks say that they need to replace "SPS-PNL DSP 17' W/WBCAM/MIC WXGA BV DL(EXCHANGE)" This would translate to my 17' WXGA Display.... That is what they are charging me for...

I actually has sent someone else to the service center to drop my laptop as i was a bit tied down... When the service center guys tested the laptop, it showed up symptoms simillar to that described by oblio98.

Plan to go personally this time and talk to them on their methodology of diagnosis...

Will keep update once i have more details...

 

$785 to fix?! Thats insane, you could get a new notebook with that money. HP needs to get a reality check. You can get a better screen and costs $250-300.

To be honest, it doesnt even sound like an LCD screen problem

Have you tried uninstalling the nvidia drivers in safe mode?

 

I almost had a seizure when my laptop collapsed... so rushed it to the HP service center at the earliest... will try fiddling around once i get my hands back on my beloved laptop...

Feel really let down by the HP service...

One of the reasons i didn't buy an AlienWare was because they don't provide support in india... Now that i have seen the level of support provided by HP service... Maybe i should have risked the AlienWare...

Hopefully i should be able to talk some sense into them, when i visit them personally this Saturday...

Fingers crossed and hoping that it is a driver issue [or something minor, definitely not a $ 785] and praying my laptop rises back from the ashes...

 

Finally went to the service center in person. Talked to the service engineer... They made me wait for an hour and finally came back and told me that the fault is only with the Graphics card.

Since Motherboard and the card are a single unit... they will have to replace the board.

I asked them to flash the BIOS and check... Since i had to flash the BIOS while upgrading to Vista. They said that they never flash the BIOS... I Still asked them to try and do it.

Lets see if they do it and, it helps...

Awaiting a new quotation by Monday. Hoping that it shouldn't cost me more than $ 350. But one never knows...

A few queries by the way...
1. Is there any chance i can upgrade to a better board/processor ?
2. Does HP even have one that comes with ATI instead compatible with the dv9000 series...

 

Quote:
I also dropped my computer once around that time, from a height of a third of a meter, maybe. The display took a hit, and a small chink (english is not my first language) opened on the right side of my screen - fixed it easily by just pressing it together again, it made a clicking sound and all was well. The insides might have had a shake as well.

Exactly the same thing happened to me. And then after a few days I was watching a movie and display was lost. I restarted the system and then It was okay. The next day I was listening to music and then again there was a display loss, restarted the system but as soon as the bios loaded HP logo display was corrupt. Windows logo was corrupt as well and there was a blue error screen.
Now what should I do. There is no warranty.
Is there any way to repair mobo instead of replacing it.

 

sorry to hear your dv9000 woes...heres the problem:
I had the exact scenario, under warranty. HP didn't give too much detail but they did checkmark next to repair/replace.......system board, heatsink fan, lcd bezel, lcd cover, and left hinge....Now the lcd display has gone into DIM mode...using an external monitor for now....
Trying to rally support for a recall, my warranty is only expired by 3-4 months...

 

All the Best!!!!!!!!

 

If the LCD is dim then the inverter or backlight is possibly faulty.

You can replace these yourself as a last resort. It should be affordable.