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.

What is Quintura?

Quintura is a search engine, but not a Google or Yahoo! clone as such. In fact, its results are retrieved from Yahoo's directory through the use of their XML API but the presentation of the results is quite intruiging.

As you can see from the snapshot below, the user interface is split into 3 main sections, the top search bar, a left category presentation of the data, and a right search result.

When you enter a search term in the search text box and click on the loop icon, the matches and associated or related categories are displayed in the left part of the screen. To the right you should see a list of links to websites or pages.

When I searched for "hoohee", I got a list of categories from which I selected "free download" by clicking on it with the mouse. The top 4 results came all from this website. Interesting.

I then jumped and tried to search for my free radio automation software, Broadcast Power. The term "Broadcast Power" returned a link from hoohee.com in the third place. So, I tried selecting the different categories from the left to see if I can narrow my search and get to the home of Broadcast Power, http://www.bp2x.com. Couldn't do it by selecting from the categories.

Plan B. Let's search for "radio automation software" then. No where to be found there too, which is fine. This time there was a "free" category. Clicking on this one didn't return bp2x.com, but it did return at the top of the list "R.O.S.S. - Free Software for Radio Automation". R.O.S.S. has a link to bp2x.com. Not quite the same thing, but good enough.

I'm not too sure how to rate this engine. It definitely is an improvement on your standard search engines in terms of user friendliness of data presentation. I like the fact that it does not use flash to present the results, although, admitedly, I fancy nice graphics of some other search engines with flash user interfaces. However, flash powered search sites tend to be a bit slower than their HTML counterparts.

Give it a try, you might like it.

I will blog next about another search engine with an interesting flash user interface.

 

If you're a C# developer interested in developing a personal finance accounting software, just drop us a line or comment here.

I am collecting interest in this application and wouldn't mind sharing the source code with suitable parties.

Maybe creating a sourceforge project and posting the code there for a start if there is interest.

Let me know what you think.

There are three new albums in the Photos category of hoohee.com.

I have replaced the html photo album code with a flash version. Let me know if this new look and feel is better and whether the speed is reasonable.

Recent photos of Poppy, my dog, were added.

Marina and I went to Cape Schank last week where I took a few pictures. You may be interested in some to add as background images to your desktop. Grab them from the photo album and drop me a comment.

Here's one which I like.

Also, I cut down two 12 meter trees from my backyard. You should see the mess.

We have just finished creating the first SuperSync help file.

You can download it from http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/help/SuperSync.chm

There is an online version of the help file which you browse to by following this link: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/help/html/index.html

We have just upgraded SuperSync to 1.5.0.5.

SuperSync is a free file and folder synchronization application

Download from: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.5.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.

What changed?

1. Fixed a bug with Synchronize All, Batch Synchronize, and Category Synchronize, which was allowing multiple threads to enter a critical piece of code while copying files.

2. Fixed an issue while deleting folder pairs on an inaccessible server. With this update you will be able to choose to delete the folder pair from the list to then delete the SuperSync history from the server manually.

3. Fixed an issue with creating new folder pairs with an empty category name. You are now forced to enter a valid category name before proceeding.

4. Fixed renaming a folder path from an unavailable remote machine to a local one. This was causing an error preventing the user from renaming the folder.

TODO List?

1. Add option to enable/disable deletes or attribute changes from action list
2. Add option to create most used folder pairs for system folders (e.g. My Documents, Favourites, Outlook default folder, etc...)
3. Add an option to disable the help balloon windows.

Where can I get this update from?

SuperSync 1.5.0.5 can be downloaded from this address: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.5.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.

We have just upgraded SuperSync to 1.5.0.4.

SuperSync is a free file and folder synchronization application

Download from: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.4.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.

Now available on:

What changed?

1. Fixed a bug in the service code which was failing deletes of history files for users when a folder pair is deleted on the client.
2. Added clarification text to the progress dialog box and made it sizeable.
3. Fixed an issue where files tagged for deletion where not found and raised a false error message at the end of a sync.
4. Fixed an issue where read only files where not being deleted.

TODO List?

1. Add option to enable/disable deletes or attribute changes from action list
2. Add option to create most used folder pairs for system folders (e.g. My Documents, Favourites, Outlook default folder, etc...)
3. Add an option to disable the help balloon windows.

Where can I get this update from?

SuperSync 1.5.0.4 can be downloaded from this address: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.4.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.

SuperSync 1.5.0.2 Basics Tutorial with Audio

The file size for this tutorial is approximately 2MB.

http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/tutorials/SuperSync - How to Use - Basics.htm 

We have just upgraded SuperSync to 1.5.0.2.

SuperSync is a free file and folder synchronization application

Download from: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.4.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.

What changed?

1. Fixed a bug with the service component that was failing a sync on an empty left folder.
2. Added help balloon windows to help new users with using the application.

TODO List?

1. Add option to enable/disable deletes or attribute changes from action list
2. Add option to create most used folder pairs for system folders (e.g. My Documents, Favourites, Outlook default folder, etc...)
3. Add an option to disable the help balloon windows.

Where can I get this update from?

SuperSync 1.5.0.2 can be downloaded from this address: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.4.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.