Allow me to flame the Hewlet Packard helpdesk a bit while helping others with the same problem. This issue should be in their FAQ, but… well… it isn’t.
The problem is that you get random reboots, hangups or BSOD’s (blue screen of death). It happens on my HP Pavilion Media PC (8170.nl), which comes with Microsoft Vista.
The cause, or at least part of the cause, became apparent after I completely reinstalled the computer, including a hardrive format. It worked fine, but after installing the windows auto update nvidia drivers, the problem came back.
Turns out, nvidia offers much newer drivers on their website then windows update does.
Something else I changed has to do with IRQ’s, and this might have helped as well. Googling the message on my BSOD resulted in lots of posts about IRQ’s (interrupts) conflicting. Now you really, really have to look for those settings in windows vista. I never found where to change the IRQ some driver uses, but I did find a list of devices, organised by IRQ, in which it was possible to ‘disable’ a device. Lucky for me, the 2 devices that shared IRQ 14 were 2 things i don’t use: tv tuner and wireless lan. Also lucky for me, microsoft didn’t forget to put that disable button there.
Anyway, does that sounds like an issue HP should know about? I’d say so. “Windows autoupdate will make your computer crash every 10 minutes”. Applies to: pavilion 8170.nl, with default software and hardware installed. Maybe I am the only one who bought this model. Who knows.
But they didn’t know. Nor is it in the FAQ. It took me 35minutes of telephone time (24 euro’s) to get to the point where the dude on the phone promised me I would be called back with a price indication of having my computer picked up and brought back, working again. Needless to say, I never received that call.
Luckily, I am the guy in my family and in my group of friends who people ask which computer to buy. Well: not HP! HAHA, revenge!
Tags: Corporate Terror, Drivers, Fail, Hardware