Zbook 15 G2 & Windows 10 - BSOD when Quadro is enabled

[stgFX]

Hello everyone,

I recently purchased a second-hand Zbook 15 G2 with the following specs:

Intel Core i7 4810

2x8GB RAM

500GB SSD (SATA)

no optical drive

Full-HD IPS display

nVIdia Quadro K2100M

3G Modem

Intel WiFi & Bluetooth

The notebook came with Window 7 preinstalled, which I immediatelly upgraded to Windows 10. And then, all the hell broke loose.

First of all, I don't know if this issue was present in Windows 7 because I erased it almost immediatelly after purchase. In the last 3 days I tried to install Windows 10 Pro x64 (June 2018 release, at least thats when I obtained the ISO from MS website). It's legal windows, no cracks or whatever. I've tried around 12 times to do a fresh install using different combination on drivers, but each time, after several devices were installed, the notebook started to freeze, sometimes BSODs saying DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. The usual case was, for example, when I opened Task Manager and clicked on Performance, the window would freeze and soon the whole notebook woulfd hang as well. Sometimes when I hit power - shutdown (or restart) - the notebook hangs. Sometimes the screen turns black and I see just the cursor and nothing else and I have to force shutdown the book. WinDBG said that the culprit was pci.sys. I updated the BIOS to the latest revision available via online update in the BIOS itself, using compressed air I cleaned the notebook vents from the service hatch but didn't help. I also tried memtest and checking the SSD for errors - but they are both OK.

What I've found out is that when I disable the Quadro card, the notebook starts to behave normally. But if it was nV problem, I think the BSODs would say a problem with nVidia driver and not pci.sys, so I think the card is OK, just there is something wrong elesewhere.

Another that I have is the mouse behaviour in UEFI - the cursor moves just fine when using the touchpad, but when I use my mouse, the cursor only moves left and right! In the old and even in the newest BIOS release.

I am thinking of reinstalling the windows 7 back, but I would like to stick with Win 10.

Any help greatly appreciated

Joseph

[stgFX]

Well, I've made some progress - I did a proper CMOS reset (unplugged the CMOS battery a left it out for like 2 hours) and also resetting the settings in BIOS itself (Factory Defaults), all of the sudden I saw Hybrid Graphics option in BIOS, so I set it to Enable. This partially helped, but there were still cases when the notebook hanged (f.e. sometimes when I wanted to turn it off).

So I've set PCIe Power Settings (in Advenced power options) to OFF (no power saving), restarted the system and since then it seems stable, I tried running some 3D benchmarks and they all went OK.

However, every single monitoring program I tried (CPU-Z, Speedfan) causes the notebook to behave weirdly or would freeze the computer. Speedfan would cause the touchpad to stop working until restart, and there is also high chance that the notebook would freeze after Speedfan was run.

CPU-Z has similar behaviour, would freeze the touchpad only for a moment but the computer would freeze some moments later.

A colleague of mine, who develops customized HW and mainboards, told me that there might be a problem with SMBus/I2C on the board, or at least in the driver(s).

[stgFX]

Now I got a freeze again. In the moment I clicked on Shutdown the computer just froze dead, had to hold power button to shut it down.

[stgFX]

I think I've finally cracked it!

I was about to resign when I read this post:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-Notebooks/Switchable-graphics-trouble-on-Windows-10/m-p/67365...

So I did clean install of Win 10, installed SoftPaq (http://ftp.hp.com/pub/caps-softpaq/cmit/HP_SDM.html), selected my OS version (Win 10 1803 x64), hit Find Updates, let it install everything in there and and all of the sudden I no longer have crashes in  Win 10!

[stgFX]

I am revivng this thread as this problem came back, after a year. After a recent windows update (cca 2 weeks ago) the problem started again, the laptop would freeze. I tried to re-install the drivers using SoftPaq download manager - would still hang. The CPU utilization would hit 100% and the computer would hang or a BSOD would appear, almost each time different.

So I've decided to re-install the system from scratch. Installed Win 10 Pro x64 1903, disabled automatic driver download, disabled driver update via Windows update, then installed SoftPaq manager, selected Latest and downloaded almost everything for the machine (except for AMD drivers and some programs like Foxit) and the problem persists.

[stgFX · Accepted solution]

So self-answer again...

I fixed the problem by choosing older GPU drivers (3xx) instead of the latest, from SoftPaq download manager. It seems that the problem was triggered by Windows Update that downloaded newer GPU drivers and rendering the notebook unusable. I disabled automatic driver installation and also driver update via Windows Update to hopefully prevent it from happening again.

[DavbaK]

Hi,

I solve the same problem. 

My laptop: ZBook 15 g2

i7, 16GB, etc., GPU: Intel HD 4600 + Nvidia Quadrom K2100M.

My drivers are completly updated, BIOS is actual, Windows 10 pro 1903, all test or scans are done, advanced setting power management done, except for Nvidia driver - When i Install Nvidia driver from HP Support - the laptop behave weird and start throwing a ,,tons" of blue screen and freeze.

Can you pls tell me, what version of Nvidia Driver you are using - i mean 3??. 

Or any other advice?

Thank you

BR