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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?

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Sounds like a graphics function that XP is trying to use to display some menu effect that isn't supported on your device, but the graphics driver incorrectly assumes is there.

To prove it's not the hardware, trying booting up any Linux LiveCD (a dvd actually) - which boots up a demonstration/evaluation mode system running from memory. These are quite up to date, and will automatically detect and use a correct graphics driver. Ubuntu is a popular one, but Linux Mint seems to be a more streamlined version (of Ubuntu). If the Linux LiveCD runs the graphics ok, finding another driver, maybe directly from Nivida might be the next step.

If you are happy with Linux, you could then convert the laptop into a dual boot system, mostly using Linux, but optionally booting into the older XP for backward compatibility.

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  • Well, I haven't had a single issue other than slow speed since I uninstalled the driver from HP, so it's probably a driver issue. Unfortunately, though, I can't figure out what driver to download from Nvidia's site! It doesn't even seem to list the GPU that my linked spec page says is in the laptop, and the closest ones I could find gave an incompatibility error before the installation. --- EDIT: And for the first time since the uninstall, my screen just spazzed out for a split second, just like before. No problems as I'm typing this. ._.
    – Roadsguy
    Apr 30, 2014 at 0:15
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    On your original HP driver link page, it has a link for "Previous versions available" with an older V4 driver. Have you tried that one? Also is there a setting in your BIOS that sets the video memory? Possible that the bios video setting doesn't match what the driver expects (so when it writes to what it thinks is video memory, it writes to system memory and causes random crashes). There might be a "reset defaults" option to verify that idea.
    – jdh
    Apr 30, 2014 at 12:02
  • Well, I tried booting from a Linux Mint LiveCD (DVD+R). On my first try, it got to the loading screen (not sure what it's called), and I started Mint normally. After a long time on a black screen with just the cursor that would sometimes freeze up and no progress after that, I gave up and tried again. The next time, I selected to start it normally and checked on something for less than a minute. When I came back, it had a completely black screen with the regular garbled vertical lines, and no response at all. ---- @jdh - No other drivers worked, and the BIOS has no such option for memory.
    – Roadsguy
    May 17, 2014 at 3:06
  • What may be important is that the glitches don't seem to happen right away when I start it up for the first time in a while. It only happens after a bit of normal use. Also, the space immediately below the monitor gets warm, but only there. This may or may not be relevant. ---- Also, what I've noticed is that pushing the little rubber tab thing that triggers the lid close will only turn off the backlight; I can still faintly see what's on the screen. It also seems to stop a lid close from putting Windows into sleep mode, but it may just not be set to sleep on lid close.
    – Roadsguy
    May 17, 2014 at 3:10

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