My laptop is an HP Compaq NC8430. It's got a T7400 running at 2.00GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200 rpm disk in it. It's a nice laptop and one of the better ones that I've had although the screen could definitely be brighter and (like all changes of laptop brand) getting used to the keyboard took time.

It's only problem (when running Vista) is that it seems to be challenged by sleep/hibernation. I'm not sure if this is a Vista problem or a driver problem but I suspect the latter.

One symptom;

What frequently happens is that after sleep the display output refuses to be sent to any monitor so you're stuck with a working laptop but with no display. If you're lucky, you can unlock it "blind" and restart it ( IIRC the key combination is START->3 right arrows->3 up arrows->ENTER :-) ).

Today, I caught it blue-screening in the ATI driver coming out of hibernation.

Vista came up after it re-started and told me that it had spotted a crash in the ATI driver. Good stuff.

I go to ATI. They say "sorry, we don't do drivers for your mobile Radeon X1600 - you need to go to the laptop manufacturer".

That's fine but when I visit HP's support page it seems to list every driver type under the sun except a display driver.

Now, I know at one time I got an ATI display driver from that page so it looks like it's gone missing - weird :-)

HP offers "Instant IM Based Support" so I gave that a whirl and (after I installed a lot of ActiveX controls) an HP guy did some searching around for me and found a version here;

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp34501-35000/sp34709.exe

The "problem" was that this claims to install version 8.331.0.0 which seems to be older than my existing version 8.391.0.0 :-(

So...seems I'm stuck with the sleep->no monitor problem for a while if it is indeed the ATI driver that's causing me problems.

The other symptom;

Sometimes the laptop just won't sleep. I hate this. I close the lid. It's set to Sleep when I close the lid but occasionally the little activity lights stay on to show that the disk is still spinning and the power's still running. It's bad when you put it into your bag and it's still running as it gets pretty hot pretty quickly.

Mike's first law of devices says "All devices need to come on and go off as soon as the power button is pressed".

Mike's second law of devices says "Mike's first law of devices is non-negotiable" :-)

Update (18/01/08) - HP's driver page does indeed now have a graphics driver section on it once again for the NC8430;

Having just had a another blue-screen I'm trying this one as I have 8.391.0 from June whereas this is 8.391.3 from August. I'll update the post again if I still have failures.