If you have landed on this page, I´m sure that you have experienced the Blue Screen of Death on your HP DV7 machine….?
If that is not correct, please read on anyway, because you might get some useable tricks for later rescue operations for you or your friends….
Well – through the years I have had a lot of computers, so I would call my self ‘ very experienced’ in the fine art of making a computer run for as long as possible – I know the manufacturers of the computeres have a different opinion, but I was really recent being forced to buy a new computer every second year, just because the new computer I buy is either impossible to repair, simply by the way it is constructed or because the repair itself would cost more thatn a used machine of the same model….
Being a bit stubbern, I have stopped buying new laptops, because the quality is worsening for each new year of production and some of the 2-4 year old machines are actually of better quality than a completely new model, materielwise that is…
Some of the new machines even has PD (Planned Death) built in, to make some of the essentiel hardware fail after a given period, typically shortly after the warranty runs out and as opposed to a liter of milk, where the date is clearly printed on the container, the computer manufaturers do not tell their customers that some or all of their products have a planned death built in to them – a little like when the light bulbs were invented – they were made so incredibly good, that some of the first ones actually still operate, but the manufaturers found out that making such high quality bulps, made their business obsolete, so they formed a secret group and decided that no light bulb should ever live more than 2500 hours, thus making sure that they created a new market for themselves continously because the consumers needed to buy replacements for their broken light bulbs.
Hmnnn – this explanation leads me to the BSOD problem.
I bought a HP/Hewlett-Packard DV7 machine that was a few years old and in absolute mint condition – it could easily pass as a completely new computer, so I naturally paid a bit more for it, than I would have done for another with more wear to show.
I happily installed first Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and shortly thereafter upgraded to Windows 10 Pro…
Now – that´s when the trouble started and here my own personal ghost in my machine woke up.
No matter what page I browsed, it made the screen start to flicker, then go black and whooooopsy B S O D right out of nowhere!
Now I suddenly learned a completely new and soon hated word: atikmdag.sys!
This file is the real ghost in the machine and turns up everywhere and all the time and I start to desperately look around the Web to find somebody else with the same problem – as it turns out, we are an extremely large group of ‘zombieDV7´s ‘ all over the World and we all fight the dreaded BSOD machine ghost…
I find a few solutions that I make a note of and start to see if I can cure my HP DV7 for this strange ghost-like sickness it has aquired, but I soon find out that the ghost has many faces and none of them is the face I am fightning in my machine.
Ok – desperate times call for desperate measures, I therefore sit down and start to think about when and where the Blue Screen of Death shows its ugly face the first time and I find that the upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, has removed the old ATI graphics driver and replaced it with a generic Microsoft driver, specially designed for ATI Radeon Mobile edition and Windows 10.
My first attempt to rescue is to find that latest Windows 8.1 driver 64 bit, in the vague hope that it will able to run without producing these BSOD errors.
Been there, done that.
Same result – BSOD – again, again and again!
Ok – now I am pissed off and I declare an all out war against my new enemy: the BSOD!
I remove the entire Windows 10 Pro installation and reinstalls the Windows 7 Pro/64 bit again, I run all the Microsoft updates and let Microsoft find the drivers for the graphics and so on – just like it is normal to do with any other computer and often works completely and fine out of the box…
NOT here!
It runs for a while and then again starts to flicker and whooooooops: BSOD!
Now I am really pissed!
I then try to roll back the driver Microsoft finds and calls ‘newest available’ and simply uninstall it, then reboot the machine to run it on a basic graphics driver – this works but in a poor quality.
I then start to check each and every corner of the Web to find other graphics drivers in the hope that I will finally find the one and only for me and my DV7 and in this process I think I find 10-15 different drivers – some of them a short pleasure and others just a cold bucket of water in the face but none of them a valid solution…
But – at least I have now found out that it is not the graphics card it self that errors, because if it was so, I would also have the problem when the driver was uninstalled and I don´t – but as soon as Windows is allowed to autoinstall a graphics driver, the trouble starts all over again…
Well – as previously mentioned, I am rather stubbern and this is after all an all out war, so I buy another used and more worn out DV7 because I want to investigate if this is just DV/, maybe a specific graphics card specific drivers that do not operate together or…..
Here the fun starts!
The ‘new’ DV7 use an Intel CPU and the ‘old’ DV7 use an AMD cpu, but they both use the same ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 graphics card
Now – ATI and AMD are more or less the same company and my thought is that the problem might also be in that fact somewhere, because whenever eg. a full version of the ATI driver and control center is installed on the ATI/AMD machine the screen gives BSOD and using the same driver on the other DV7 machine with the Intel CPU does not…
I know – this is not the problem, but I am sure that it somewhere has some parts of the truth in it.
Well – further in my investigation Í the tried something completely new.
Clean install of Windows 7 Pro with SP1 and NOTHING else – the machine is not allowed to access the Web and only has the drivers that the Windows 7 Pro install delivers when installed.
I then go into controlpanel and disallows windows to automatically install updates and drivers, then I reboot and setup the web access.
Amazingly the computer runs without BSOD of any kind!
At least this tells me that it is not the graphics card it self that errors, but some of the extremely many other files that suddenly don´t work together and then creates hammock and releases the ghost in my machine…
So – I now have a super running HP DV7 machine that runs without errors – unfortunately it has no antivirus installed, it lacks all the updates post Windows 7Pro SP1 and all other driver updates and is therefore a zombie waiting to be attacked by some evil virus….
BUT – I found the ghost in the machine and killed it (or at least hid its gasoline) and I now can look at the machine and see how pretty it is in all its non-BSOD might……
The future for my AMD HP DV7?
Well – it has the same nice 1600×900 display as my other DV7 and all other parts fits it as well, so the bright future of my rescued HP DV7 seems to be as a glorious donor and thereby create life to mine and maybe other peoples HP DV7 and therefore live on ‘forever’….
Feel free to ask or comment on this post – I have a bundle of experience in disecting DV7´s now and all that knowledge might as well be helping maybe You or others….