Dislpay Driver issues in HP 15-ab206nu/Win7

[Zlatina]

I have a HP notebook that I bought in June and installed a clean copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64b on. With some help from this forum I managed to install all the necessary drivers and things were OK for a month or so. However, since late July and Nvidia's driver updates my system has been getting progressively unstable. I use it mainly to play World of Warcraft and some light, 2013 or earlier, games. It doesn't see a lot of usage. I get BSOD - usually two or three a day- when playing upwards of 4 or more hours. Before the blue screen my game would stutter, freeze to black and switch to the desktop, with a little error balloon popping up from the notification area: "Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered: Nvidia kernel (current version) has..." and so on.

I have scoured the GPU. I've had it run on Nvidia drivers from 2015, back from my old laptop, from this year, on the latest drivers too and uninstalled it more times than I care to write about. I have ran diagnostics - within my limited knowledge- and malware detectors and antiviral programs. I have even used Windows Update as a last, desperate measure.(hah!)  I just got BSOD while the notebook was sitting idly on my desk and I was reading a book. Posting the image:

I'm running in 1366/768 resolution, in desktop and in all games. Not pushing the computer's limits at all, I think.
I'm almost - almost- to the point of seeking a specialist and having him tinker away but I have sensitive professional data (including patients' files) and would rather not. The BSOD worries me, because I have encountered it once or twice on the 3 machines I work with - me and my parents notebooks.

In addition, I can't seem to find drivers for my Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller, with the following hardware IDs:

PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8136&SUBSYS_80A4103C&REV_0A
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8136&SUBSYS_80A4103C
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8136&CC_020000
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8136&CC_0200

I found an answer with those IDs on this forum, but it doesn't work for me.

I'm stumped. I have done a lot of things with my computers and a problem this persistent that I can't solve hasn't arisen. The HP support assistant isnt helping and I'm thinking of a clean install. I'm worried that the problem might be physical and then I will need help, because I know almost nothing about hardware problems. A friend suggested I take off all Nvidia software, but I havent tried that yet.

Any ideas would be welcome.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Your friend is not helping. How would you "take off" nVidia hardware that is soldered to the motherboard? You can forget that "option". From what I am seeing in the specs, the laptop came with FreeDOS. It is a Skylake 6th generation platform with the nVidia 940m video chip. It is frankly not designed to run Windows 7. Windows 7 can be made to run on a Skylake platform but it seems as if it is a series of workarounds for hardware made to run on Windows 10. 

HP does not support that model series with discrete graphics for Windows 7. Normally, if HP had offered that model with Windows 7, HP would write the video drivers. But you are using the stock nVidia drivers made to work with a wide range of video chips on all kinds of platforms. 

Yes, #1 if you have sensitive patient information please back up. You are storing valuable data on an unstable platform which makes me nervous. Secondly, yes I would do a clean install of Windows 7. Are you getting Microsoft updates? New Windows 7 installs have gotten obscenely difficult as you can only get Updates working with a lot of effort. I don't think Microsoft really wants anybody doing new install of Windows 7 at this point. 

If the Windows 7 install gives the least indication it is heading back down the drain, I would install Windows 10 on it, not because I like Windows 10 (I actually do but that is not the point). In this case, I think you need to go mainstream. If Windows 10 gives you problems then we can start discussing possible hardware issues. But if you can clean install an OS on it then very likely the hardware is fine.  

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I recommend that you install only the W7 drivers from the 15t-ab000 support page, except the BIOS and firmware files.

http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-Pavilion-15-ab000-Notebook-PC-series/7771366/mode...

You will also find the ethernet driver you need on that model's support page...

This package provides the Realtek Local Area Network (LAN) Driver that enables the Realtek Network Interface Card (NIC) Chip in supported notebook models that are running a supported operating system.

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp71001-71500/sp71191.exe

[Zlatina]

Thank you Paul, but after deleting the old and installing everything you pointed out the problem went unchanged. I downloaded Win 10 and installed it and it has been surprisingly good, no software problems for the last 3 days. Thank you for the help though! 🙂

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Glad everything works when running W10.