Have you got an HP Compaq nw9440 laptop?

They're a great laptop with lots of grunt and a huge screen. And this is exactly why I decided to buy one of them.

These little wonders come with an NVIDIA Quadro 1500M chipset that does all the drawing on your 17" screen. But the driver that comes with the laptop is old and is the only driver from HP that has an installer that works for this chipset.

The HP driver works fine. Well, almost. It works fine for most situations, but starts falling for applications with lots of text. For example, when working with large Excel spreadsheets, I had Excel crash more than 5 times on me in a day. Each time this happens, it was preceeded by certain misbehaviour in drawing cells, rows, or refreshing the display. Let this happen a few times and kaboom!

This calls for a driver upgrade. Surely HP or NVIDIA must have fixed this issue by now. So I searched HP's website for an updated driver with no luck there. Then I moved on to search on NVIDIA's website. And behold, I find a newer release of the driver.

I downloaded the Quadro FX driver for Windows XP and tried to install it, but it failed with this error:

"nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit." 

The reason this installer fails is that it couldn't find the device it was written for. The installer will run for the Quadro 1500 chipset but not for the 1500M. M stands for mobile.

Hum.....

Force installing the driver seemed to me a good solutions. I was desparate to fix the redraw issue in Excel.

Again this did not fix my problem. It did however delay it from happening and Excel was crashing less often.

To plan B. I decided after this failure to download the NVIDIA FX drivers (162.18_forceware_winxp_32bit_english_whql.exe). Similar to its Quadro brother, the installer did not run on the nw9440.

Didn't NVIDIA manufacture and sell this chipset?

Why is it then that they don't provide an updated driver for it?

Let me see, hardware ... software... software for hardware... hummmm. Duuuhhhh!

Well you want a solution. Luckily I've got one for you.

Please note that if you follow my solution here, do so at your own perril. I take no responsibility for any damage or result of taking action based on my blog. If you are unsure of what this procedure does or the effects of it, please do not try to follow it.

If you read on NVIDIA's forums, you can see the frustration of people with this chipset.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t26943.html

Well I guss Ill just answer my own question, since it doesn't seem anyone here had come accross this problem.
I called nVidia, and sorry for my flame on this, but I was informed that nVidia doesn't support the Mobile graphics chips (beside the Go serieis).
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Then why is it that when I download the driver from HP, it unzips and then launches the NVIDIA install package?!!!
Thats not an HP driver!
Anyway, Im sure there is a valid explanation for this, but I find it to be silly.
So for anyone who may come accross this problem:
I ended up FORCE installing just the regular Quadro FX 1500 driver from 100.59 (instead of the 1500M).
So far so good, I havn't had a crash yet, but I am still throwing games and apps at it to make sure.

Although Dave suggests a solution in the forum, it did not work for me.

Run dpinst.exe

Then, update video driver, say browse my computer, and let me pick , use have disk, point to the folder the above loaded files which is
windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\nv_lh.inf

Works like a champ and I have all the resolutions for the display now.

Dave

I couldn't find dpinst.exe nor could I find nv_lh.inf.

What I did find, though, was a file called "nvbl.inf" in the Windows\system32 directory. This file has the parameters needed by the installer. Take the values in "nvbl.inf" and place them in the file "nv4_disp.inf" found in the NVIDIA installer directory. I will leave a link to the file as I have modified it if you want to grab a copy and see what I've done.

Click here to get my copy of nv4_disp.inf

I ran "setup.exe" and now it happily installed.

After a reboot, I loaded up the large Excel spreadsheet I was working on a gave it a try. After 15 minutes of trying, it didn't crash. So I've got my solution, it seems.

UPDATE 1

After a few hours of work, I put my laptop in standby mode and when I restarted it, it seems the issue is back. This time, I noticed bad display with Internet Explorer. When I use the mouse scroll wheel to move up and down pages, it leaves white marks behind. Google search results seems to do it quite often.

Back to searching. This time I was looking for the "NVIDIA_G71.DEV_029B.2", which is the driver name for the 1500M chipset. Found the following link http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1315, but it's dated back to 2006-02-03 21:55:56. Don't want that.

Now from the previous thread I went to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8128. Very interesting post indeed. Let's see where this will take us.

From laptopvideo2go's website I got to this easy to follow thread:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9243

So far so good but none of the modified inf files work with the latest driver, so back to modifying the inf file manually.

Click here to get the inf file for the nVidia Quadro 91.85 version.

This seems to work.

1. Download the nVidia Quadro 91.85 installer from nvidia's website.
2. Use the modified inf file to replace the one that comes with the 91.85 installer
3. Install the driver

UPDATE 2

30 hours running so far without any issues. Looks like this was the solution.

Hope that it works out for you.