Is it kicken the bucket?

I got a HP dv9743cl (SSD for primary with Win. 7 32 bit) which I've had from new and starting yesterday it keeps crashing on me. I did a clean install last night of Win. 7 (from 64 to 32 current) thinking it is a software issue and it has again crashed on me again for the first time after the install.

I had started up a game of Warcraft 3 today and about 5 minutes into the game it starts freezing and unfreezing then some funkiness pixelation of the screen and shuts off. Restarts on its own and goes into the "select which mode of windows you want to start" but its funky looking, discolored, some weird 8bit blue boxes in a pattern on the screen, and it'll start up into safe mode. I shut it down and restart and comes to windows normal mode fine.

Yesterday however, it would not restart so easily and constantly collapse. Occasinally it would give a error message saying "NVIDIA kernal mode driver failure" and even a update of driver from the NVIDIA website was not doable as it kept crashing in the middle of it. Blue physical dump screen, weird 8 bit looken boxes of blue color, strange distortion of the screen...

Anyone know whats up with this? Time for a new laptop?

NVIDIA 8600GS

 

Sounds like you're suffering from the "famous" nVidia failures. Unless you have warranty coverage (I don't remember if this model is covered under the recent settlement), your only options are baking or some other method of repair. Or a new notebook, if you'd rather go that way.

 

Yes. Perhaps a new mobo also. But that means you are simply delaying the inevitable. Which might not be bad thing economically speaking. Once fixed, a copper shim between the heatsink and GPU heatspreader would also help to further delay the inevitable failure of the GPU.

Service manual: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01951704.pdf

Will have pertinent part numbers as well as disassembly instructions.

 

I was guessing it was the GPU problem. I'm tempted to go and buy a brand new Asus G73SW-A1 as this one is getting more and more unstable. It's started crashing with online surfing.

I think I'll just use the simple things on it for now till I find a laptop that is more reliable in the long run.

Also, I didn't see my model under the settlement. I don't get why they didn't include it since its having the same issues.

 

Mine was exactly like that weeks ago. I bought a motherboard off ebay and works perfect now for another year! It was $100 with shipping. Very easy to swap, need small screwdrivers and follow the manual 2.0 linked above. My motherboard came with a copper shim for the nvidia chip. The ebay sale said there was a shim, so look for that if you do so.

A new laptop sounds good too. But I figured I liked my DV9774 so much and not that old and still quick, so $100 was well worth fixing.

If you do, the exact motherboard HP Part # sticker is right under the door for the RAM, stuck to the motherboard. If you are on ebay and looking at pictures you will see in their pictures the same sticker in the same area... theres different motherboards for the DV9xxx series (Intel and AMD, and so on).

 

If you are comfortable disassembling your laptop (and can follow instructions, the service manual is linked in an above post), I recommend the hair dryer on the GPU trick - I've successfully used it on two different laptops. Basically you have to heat up the underside of the GPU to melt the solder and then press on the top to firmly reconnect it to the board. You can then also apply more thermal paste and/or copper shims, etc to increase pressure on the chip to hopefully prevent this from happening again but I just added new paste. There are videos on YouTube showing the procedure as well.

I wouldn't recommend a "new" board because it will have the same exact problem as your existing one sooner or later. If the free fix works for you, you'll save a nice chunk of change.

A lot of models that should be included in the settlement are not, just as with HP's extended repair service for this problem years ago. It sucks but there's nothing us normal people can do about it.