Windows 7 Instability on dv6409wm

I have had this HP dv6409wm notebook for several years now, and for the last year have had the Windows 7 RC 64-bit edition installed to replace the original Windows Vista Home Premium.

I never had any problems with the Windows 7 RC working, but finally today after much procrastination have installed the Windows 7 Professional 64-bit professional onto the laptop. The installation initially went without a problem, but after getting drivers reinstalled and doing some Windows Updates, I noticed general instability in Windows. It has been freezing up every few seconds and requires a Ctrl+Alt+Del and another minute of waiting until everything seems to catch up and come unfrozen for another few seconds. I checked on the system resource usage and it never is fully loading the processor when this happens and only about half of the RAM is ever accessed either.

Currently I am checking the RAM for any errors using MEMTEST but I don't see that as likely as I didn't have a single issue like this at all until just today installing Windows 7. So far the test has passed once without any errors.

Do you have any ideas what might be causing this? Are there some corrupt drivers for the dv6000 series (their Vista drivers) that don't work properly in Windows 7 Professional? Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

 

I installed win 7 on my old hdx 16 and it had similar issues. I found that the IDT audio was the culprit, but I guess in your case you said the processor wasn't being taxed very much. What sort of temps are you seeing when the freezes occur?

Edit: Also even though hp says the vista drivers are compatible some of them aren't, i.e. idt & media center buttons. If you were willing to do a clean install try checking how the pc works after reinstalling each individual driver.

 

Hmm, i have Win7 and IDT drivers and everything working. Dunno where you experienced problems but...

Why are you using the RC? Windows 7 has been out retail for a while.

 

I purchased my hdx over a year ago.

 

Thanks for your replies!

I am thinking you might very well be correct that this is an incompatible driver issue. Everything runs fine while I am first loading into Windows using the default drivers. The only drivers that I got installed, however, were the nForce chipset drivers. I noticed that the HP media buttons drivers (and many other drivers from their website) won't even load properly to install in Vista.

I did a fresh installation of Windows 7 again, this time only installing the nForce Chipset drivers. Windows Update then recognized and downloaded updated drivers for the nVidia Go 6150 graphics, sound, wireless, ethernet, and touchpad without issue. Again, at first after installing all of these everything seemed to work fine so I started to copy over and install my required applications. Firefox was first, but immediately after download is when I started noticing the freezing return. It appears that the computer continues to work fine for a few seconds (the gadget up at the top right shows CPU/memory usage as well as the clock, and all continue working for a while) until everything freezes. The temperatures are never running hot really, and after I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del the computer somewhat catches up, allows me to bring up the task manager, and then will freeze again within another few seconds.

The reason I hadn't upgraded from the Windows 7 RC to the full release on this laptop yet was honestly because I had been holding out waiting to completely replace this laptop. That didn't look to be possible now before the deadline when the RC expires so I am getting around to upgrading.

 

The stock sound drivers in Win7 don't work properly, the HP Vista ones will. Or if you got Conexant audio try the driver in my signature (64-bit only). Same for video (get them from laptopvideo2go.com, i personally use the Dox modified 185.85 and it is 15% faster than any other driver including the latest ones), and wireless, get them from HP.

But the first thing you should do is get the full retail version. And you don't need any of that media button thingies, the playback control and volume keys work fine by themselves. For the quickplay buttons check out the software in my signature and you can control them at will.

 

Thank you for this information, I will look into this and get back with the results. I will be heading out of town the rest of this week but hopefully will get some time during the travels to look into this issue.