Crashing Pavillon DV9600 Help?

[ceebee]

  I have an HP Pavilion DV9600 notebook with Windows Vista Premium Home edition, all updates current. It is about 2 years old (thus out-of-warranty) but ‘low milage’, mostly used during its younger life only when I travel. I recently put it into home (daily) service when my pc’s hard drive crashed, but shortly after I did encountered a problem with it crashing, and discovered another concern, problem, whatever.

  It has crashed several, several times unpredictably, sometimes a few weeks between crashes and some a few days.     When it crashes it either locks up or ‘blue screens’. Every time this has happened I’ve had to reload the hard drive (with the HP Recovery Disks), trying recovery options, even using Windows Recovery Points wont restore the OS.

 I tried several things to find the crashing problem, all to no avail:

1) Removed one, then the other Memory chips (512 MB each) from it. Also tried swapping the slot being used (when only 1 of the 2 chips were installed), no help.

2) Replaced the hard drive. Purchased an identical hd (used the old, factory hd in the other slot, wanted more storage space only. Again no help.

3) Tried reloading Windows both from the Recovery Partition HP created on the hd, and from the Recovery CD’s from the factory load (I burned these on initial setup when the notebook was new).

Also, probably not related, but in case it might have a bearing on the above. When removing and swapping the memory chips I noticed a ‘bluetooth.wireless’ chip in the same compartment (I use bluetooth with this notebook, but with a USB.dongle (BTW wireless LAN works great). The part number on the chip came back (on HP parts locator) to be a Wireless LAN card w/ Bluetooth). Nothing shows up in Device Mgr or the Bluetooth in Control Panel. Is this card Bluetooth and not working, or what?

Any ideas how to fix this (these) problems? Thanks for taking the time to read all this, thanks even more if you can help!

[iam_fletcher]

It sounds like you have covered all the normal steps. It's not the hard drive. It's not the software, it's not the ram. You have done all regular updates. Have you done a BIOS update? All I can think of at this point is possibly a BIOS error. A BIOS update will fix that problem usualy. If that doesn't fix it, then your BIOS may have an ireprible error, or your motherboard might be hosed. Unfortuantly with the notebook being out of warranty if it is one of those problems, it wont be cheap to fix.

[innerspace]

I have a similar situation with my dv9610. I've restored the computer three times trying different updates but keep getting the same error when I restart: 0x00000007e (0x0000005, 0x8FD59DC9, 0X875C4BE8, 0X875C48E4). Looks like I was expecting all three features from the first sacred law of computers.