HP Pavilion Notebook Graphics

HP publicly announced late last month that some of their notebooks had shipped with bad graphics chips. They’ve known this for about nine months now and have had an extended warranty in place at least since April, when I received a critical update e-mail.

The reason I write about this now is because I own an HP Pavilion dv2025nr – one of the laptops with a faulty chip. The dv2000 series generally uses the GeForce Go 6150, which is basically a slight step up from AMD-based integrated graphics. BIOS options let you assign 32 to 128 MB of the computer’s DDR2 RAM to graphics. It’s noticeably slower than the discrete graphics cards like the GeForce 8***M series, which currently ship in most of HP and Dell’s entertainment notebooks, and far less powerful, but it was sufficient to play c.2001 games like Deus Ex, Warcraft III and Diablo 2 at a decent framerate after I upgraded to 2GB of RAM. It even played World of Warcraft with all the graphics set to low and all of the notebook’s bloatware removed.

The bad chips basically cause a malfunction where if you turn on your computer, the LED Quicklaunch buttons light up, the drive starts to spin, you can hear the fan, but the screen stays dark. It seemed to happen more often when the laptop was hot, and less often after I’d let it cool down.

So I sent the notebook back under the extended warranty, which was fast and convenient. Received it less than a week later (they’d said seven to ten business days, so that was cool). Started it up. The screen started up perfectly, which was cool. But when the boot sequence was completed, the graphics were terrible – like 1987 terrible. My Nintendo Entertainment System had better color than this. Settings were locked on 800 by 600, 4-bit color. I tried downloading new drivers – sp33547 and sp 33549 (these are published by HP). No luck. Got on HP chat support and installed again, plus tried two of NVidia’s Forceware drivers – 169.21 and 175.19. Still no luck. Updated the BIOS to F.39 and THEN updated the drivers to sp33549, and still no luck. Now I get to send it back.

Will update when it returns.

UPDATE: I figured out that after installing the new drivers, rather than using Display Properties to try to change the settings, I had to go into the NVidia control panel.  Once I did that, it popped into perfect color and focus.  The dv2025nr is still not suitable to any 3D games released after about 2001, but it can play PC ports of original XBox and PS2 games, and classics like Warcraft 3.