Sunday, 9/25/2011
I finally decided to take a stab at the HP Pavilion dv6t quad edition(XW898AV-5CH1170PCB) laptop. I bought this laptop 5 months ago for my brother, but the day I bought it started giving me problems, and blue screen of death was the biggest one. I got really fed up of it, and formatted the entire computer. I replaced the Windows 7 Home edition with a Ubuntu 11. I am a huge fan of Ubuntu OS. Even after I placed Ubuntu, I kept on having issues with OpenOffice. It would type multiple characters, and there was a lot of delay whenever I tried tryping my documents. For me this was a minor issue, but for my brother it wasn't a pretty picture. I caved into his request, and formatted the laptop with Windows 7 Professional. I had a spare copy from McKendree MSDN software.
I thought my troubles would go away with Windows 7, as it has plug and play features, but to my chagrin, it didn't install most of the drivers. The only thing working was keyboard, and CD/DVD drive. Either way I meticulously trucked along, and searched for drivers in hp.com. I searched with HP Pavilion dv6t, and it routed me to software download page. I thought this is it, I found the magic potion, but to my dismay again this was a wrong software again. This was me about a month ago. Couple of weeks later I ran into a blog in Lifehacker.com which mentioned free software that details all the hardware in the system. I was busy again, so I stalled the project in back burner.
Finally on Saturday night it rang into my mind, so I downloaded Hwinfo64 to figure out what kind of hardware my laptop has. It showed me the devices, and after performing stringent Google search on the devices I was able to find a driver for chipset. I had that installed, and some conflicts in hardware were resolved in the device manager. This process wasn't straightforward like downloading form the internet, as the ethernet card, and USB port weren't working. The best way to troubleshoot came in the form of enabling ethernet, and then installing required drivers from the internet. I was able to do that for most of drivers, except for now 2 issues from 15. I tried on and on, and finally caved into HP's customer service.
I talked with the chap from Pakistan, and he gave me correct model number of my laptop. I was a superhero now, I finally finished another issue, and re-downloaded all the drivers. Now the last bit of issue remains that of USB conflict. Only 1 USB works out of 4, and HP is sending me the recovery CD. Hopefully by Wednesday I should be able to fix the last remaining issue.
Oh!!! the registration with the Microsoft was also a big bugger. I couldn't deauthorize the installation from the old computer, so it's still asking me for the key. This will be solved with the another MSDN download hopefully. Either way I can mark this as 95% complete regarding my hardware setup.
