I have an old Pavilion zv5200 (service tag zv5260us) whose hard drive died a few years ago. Just recently, I picked up a used hard drive for it just to get it working again as a small, fun project. The Windows XP SP1a install went well, and it updated to SP3 no problem. But I've been having some graphics issues.
According to this page from HP, the laptop has the NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go GPU, so I grabbed the appropriate driver from this other page, also from HP, and installed it on the laptop. Suddenly, instead of the incorrect, stretched 4:3 resolution of Windows' default driver, it detected the monitor properly, set itself to 1680x1050, and everything seemed to be working. But of course, it wasn't. Now, at any random action (e.g. right-click context menus, taskbar notifications, etc.), the GPU messes up and stops updating the screen, instead displaying garbage around whatever of Windows was last shown on the screen.
Strangely, though, when it glitches out, it seems to lock up the computer. Going into the command line blind by way of Win+R and entering "cmd" to shut it down doesn't do anything, and a lid close doesn't put it to sleep or anything. This may make it seem like a bigger hardware issue than the GPU messing up everything at once, but uninstalling the GPU driver "fixes" it. Windows' default driver, while painfully slow at any resolution, is much more stable than the GPU driver, so it seems, and hasn't glitched out once yet.
So, is this a hardware issue like I first thought, or a driver issue? I guess if it's the former, I'm left with a bunch of maybe-useful parts, but if it's the latter, how do I fix it, since I got this driver straight from HP?