Important: Big win for nVidia GeForce-equipped laptop owners

[theholycow]

Cliff's: Laptop ran like absolute turd and behaved like a jerk. One minor fix to the behavior problem and suddenly it runs great too. Ecstatic cao.

Original long post:
I have an HP DV2600 series laptop with a nVidia GeForce something-or-other video card. It has run like a turd for as long as I've been running it (clean [apart from appropriate drivers] XP install a month or two ago), thrashing the hard disk constantly and being intolerably slow.

It ran horribly slow when it was my wife's computer with Vista pre-installed, too, so I decided that it must just somehow be the slowest hardware ever to have a dual-core 1.6GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. I accepted the slowness.

One thing that's been bothering me has been that every time I boot it, or every time I wake it from hibernation, it forgets my display settings. I have it hooked up to a monitor rather than using the built-in LCD. I'd turn it on, and for a few seconds it'd show on the monitor, then it would freeze up, blink the monitor and LCD a few times, and output to the LCD.

Fed up with that behavior I googled and found this last night:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s...dpost&p=542187

It says to adjust your settings and then disable the nVidia windows service.

This morning I turn it on. Lo and behold, success!


Then I noticed something: No hard disk thrashing, and everything is so much more responsive than it was before. Could it really be that the nVidia service was slowing this computer to a crawl since we got it for my wife back in 2006 (or was it 2007)?

So now it runs like it should, or has for the 10 minutes since I turned it on. It won't be a speed demon if I throw something heavy at it but at least I won't spend most of my time staring at its near-frozen state as it thrashes the hard disk endlessly.


---------- Post added at 06:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:06 AM ----------

Another thought:

I always prefer drivers that are small and simple. Windows can provide most of the interface that I need to control the hardware. The driver should install using the Windows driver installation interface, not using a setup.exe like it was an application...and it damn well shouldn't install a service. This reminds me that I need to go with my instincts and disable garbage like that, because I am right. Stupid modern overgrown driver crap.

[VmaxEngage]

[stonehenge]

HP Printer drivers needed?


Brb 500mb exe file



Problem?

[theholycow]