[WhydoIask?]

I'd rather pay geek squad $300+ to do it for me. I don't trust myself that much. Unless you can do it with an external hard drive (one that connects via USB or over a network.)

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This is bad: after leaving my laptop on for about half an hour, the video driver still crashes.

Looks like I'm going to geek squad after all.

[WhydoIask?]

This is bad: after leaving my laptop on for about half an hour, the video driver still crashes.

Looks like I'm going to geek squad after all.

[rshaffer61]

Well I hope they can fix it but I'm afraid since it is a laptop they may not be able to fix the video.
Short of formatting and bringing the system back to factory settings.

[WhydoIask?]

Ok, a little late, but I went to a local computer store, the manager (it was just him and a desk clerk) took one look at my computer and said "I bet I can guess what the problem is."

It turns out there was what amounts to a Silent Recall of nearly all HP dv-series notebooks (by "silent," I mean HP never told the public, and, according the the computer store manager, it takes some pushing to actually get HP to act on the recall.) There is a problem with the motherboard, and an update for the BIOS is supposed to fix that. the manager is going to restore my data from my hard drive, then send it to hp to fix the motherboard problem.

And it won't cost nearly as much as going to Geek Squad. They would have charged me 70 bucks just to tell me what the manager told me for free!

[rshaffer61]

Congratulations. for a successful resolution for your issue. I am happy everything has been worked out for you.
Make sure you have backup in hand and verified.
With that we can at least make sure of no lose of your important data.

Please keep us informed as to the progress and results.
We will continue to monitor this topic for your updates and good job finding the problem.

[WhydoIask?]

Thanks.

The manager said it would take two weeks for HP to fix the problem.

[rshaffer61]

WOW!!!!
Two weeks to flash a bios.
Normally takes about a minute but I guess with shipping time and the amount of systems they probably have to work on, that makes sense.

[WhydoIask?]

At least he's only charging me for the hours to recover my hard drive.

[rshaffer61]

He sounds like a reasonable technician then. Most would charge a lot more and not do anything different.
In all honesty most won't do the backups either.
They normally say that is your responsibility.
I'm glad to see there are some who are there for their customers and not just for the money.