So I had a laptop in “the shop” here for troubleshooting. Wouldn’t boot. Turned out it was booting, just not showing video, not even POST and BIOS status.
Long story short, it’s an HP laptop that probably has the NVIDIA mobile video board problem. It’s so widespread I’m not even going to post a link, just google “nvidia video laptop”. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it either. However the latest (and not the only) settlement http://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-failure-g84-g86-settlement,11400.html has closed, so there’s no recourse.
I was able to get it up, literally after a couple of evenings of dorking with it, by getting it into safe mode with an external monitor. From there I was able to drop the driver back to the Windows default VGA, and boot the laptop, still with the external monitor, at 640x480 (cue painful sigh).
I had a brainstorm. I would get one of those USB video cards I always see advertised, and bypass the internal soldered card! It would not be a mobile solution (as an external monitor would be required) but it would at least make the laptop usable (with a decent resolution and color depth).
So I ordered one from Amazon, for about $60. About the middle of the road in price and quality I’d say. Well to cut to the chase, what I found is that these devices, which depend on a technology called DisplayLink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayLink , need an actual working video adapter in the PC, in order to work. All they do is EXTEND so you can mirror or extend your desktop. So if your video card is missing, broken, or even just having driver issues, the USB card won’t work. Big bummer. Well, at least you don’t have to spend your money learning this lesson! And I can use the device, no worries about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment