Greetings,
I'm German, be nice to my English skills
Before we start, I have to mention, that I'm quite a computer nerd, where I found fabrication errors on ASRock mainboards due to the FX 970 Chipset while using a FX processor (ASRock's still shit company btw.), unspecific laptop behaviours (fan running at 100% speed) due to low cmos battery whereas experts still thinking it might be a faulty windows update *facepalm and high cpu temperature, although cpu running stock same as cpu fan running fine, fresh thermal paste, and a good working thermal sensor (who would assume a faulty power supply - hands up?).
Unfortunately, I came to a point, where I couldn't spend any more time digging. So, here I am, with warranty expired 8 days ago, in need of some ideas which I might have overlooked.
So, the main problem is, that after a proper shut down, the laptop have a high chance in starting with a blackscreen. This only happens, when you have the laptop shutted down for at least a couple of minutes. An immediate restart, results in a lesser chance of a black screen. Sometimes you do see the bios logo (or at least the Victus logo) and sometimes you see absolutely nothing. Pressing the on / off button for a couple of seconds turns the laptop off immediately. Another immediate restart "might" help, most likely it stays with a black screen for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, the laptop shuts down itself, recognizing something odd.
A restart is quite a roulette. It might work, it might not. Also this problem exist when you let the laptop hibernate, e. g. just closing the lid but not shutting it down completely. Opening the lid will just turn on the keyboard illumination but not waking up this piece of trash.
Did some research and found out, it might be most likely the AMD graphics driver. The laptop came with pre-installed drivers, as well as "AMD Adrenalin Edition". Device Manager is showing me two graphic cards. https://pasteboard.co/iECy5mmu22mD.jpg
Right now, whenever the graphics card loses its drivers, this error occurs. https://pasteboard.co/ebteagnMwV8L.png This error goes away the moment I install the driver automatically via device manager (see next phrase). If the system does a good and clean start, you'll also see two devices in the task manger. https://pasteboard.co/0aIbYpZXOE1J.png
Easy trick to solve this is just to click on the device manager at the faulty hardware part and installing the driver automatically. But, this doesn't last long, remember the next restart, will "probably" doing the same black screen thing.
This picture in the link shows the taskmanger as well the device manager after a "faulty restart" with a previous happened black screen. Pretty obvious where the culprit is, isn't it? I'd say, your assumption is wrong. Installing the graphics driver from HP, installing the graphics driver from the AMD website, installing graphics driver with those driver packages where they swear about always finding the perfect driver (version) for the installed hardware, uninstalling it with this eternal good ultimate clean graphic driver uninstaller, doing thousands of restarts assuring that there isn't a single bit in the whole ecosystem, isn't doing its trick. So, the laptop feels right now like those good old windows xp times, where you have to install the graphic drivers first to get the smooth desktop feeling e. g. moving a explorer window or such (not to mention the choppy video playback). I've plugged a TV via HDMI to the laptop, but when the black screen happens, nothing is showing.
So, I've decided to roll back the BIOS update hoping this might help but it wasn't. Checked the HP website and saw, that there was an even newer BIOS version, I've used. Easy thing, I did another BIOS update to the newest version available, but the problem persists.
I started all hardware check ups. SSD Drive in a good SMART condition, some errors in the data system found due to hard restarts but chkdsk /f /r does the trick. RAM memory fine (memtest), opened the laptop and reseated them just in case. Not much of dust in there either. Graphic cards test, working fine. Checked all connectors, but they were fine so far.
Occasionally the laptop is generating BSoD with the wildest error messages. Once, it's the hard drive, then, it's the graphics card, then it's the RAM memory. Then it's losing programs e. g. Google Chrome which needs to be re-installed to start the browser again, sometimes, it's ultra slow like a hardware didn't got initialized by the mainboard. Hard to explain, but I hope this gives some experts out there an idea.
As you can see it's quite unstable https://pasteboard.co/iIdDlhwcd3Ee.png
There are no virus, trojan horses, rootkits, spyware or anything else on the computer, the last check up was yesterday with highest heuristics making alarms even the laptop just thinking in catching something. The problem with the black screen existed before an Anti Virus program was installed.
Attached 5 minidumps: https://www.sendspace.com/file/065wht
I'd love to hear some suggestions but nothing regarding a "re-install Windows". It's not possible yet as I'm in the middle of a payroll.
Good luck.
Stefan
I'm German, be nice to my English skills
Before we start, I have to mention, that I'm quite a computer nerd, where I found fabrication errors on ASRock mainboards due to the FX 970 Chipset while using a FX processor (ASRock's still shit company btw.), unspecific laptop behaviours (fan running at 100% speed) due to low cmos battery whereas experts still thinking it might be a faulty windows update *facepalm and high cpu temperature, although cpu running stock same as cpu fan running fine, fresh thermal paste, and a good working thermal sensor (who would assume a faulty power supply - hands up?).
Unfortunately, I came to a point, where I couldn't spend any more time digging. So, here I am, with warranty expired 8 days ago, in need of some ideas which I might have overlooked.
So, the main problem is, that after a proper shut down, the laptop have a high chance in starting with a blackscreen. This only happens, when you have the laptop shutted down for at least a couple of minutes. An immediate restart, results in a lesser chance of a black screen. Sometimes you do see the bios logo (or at least the Victus logo) and sometimes you see absolutely nothing. Pressing the on / off button for a couple of seconds turns the laptop off immediately. Another immediate restart "might" help, most likely it stays with a black screen for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, the laptop shuts down itself, recognizing something odd.
A restart is quite a roulette. It might work, it might not. Also this problem exist when you let the laptop hibernate, e. g. just closing the lid but not shutting it down completely. Opening the lid will just turn on the keyboard illumination but not waking up this piece of trash.
Did some research and found out, it might be most likely the AMD graphics driver. The laptop came with pre-installed drivers, as well as "AMD Adrenalin Edition". Device Manager is showing me two graphic cards. https://pasteboard.co/iECy5mmu22mD.jpg
Right now, whenever the graphics card loses its drivers, this error occurs. https://pasteboard.co/ebteagnMwV8L.png This error goes away the moment I install the driver automatically via device manager (see next phrase). If the system does a good and clean start, you'll also see two devices in the task manger. https://pasteboard.co/0aIbYpZXOE1J.png
Easy trick to solve this is just to click on the device manager at the faulty hardware part and installing the driver automatically. But, this doesn't last long, remember the next restart, will "probably" doing the same black screen thing.
This picture in the link shows the taskmanger as well the device manager after a "faulty restart" with a previous happened black screen. Pretty obvious where the culprit is, isn't it? I'd say, your assumption is wrong. Installing the graphics driver from HP, installing the graphics driver from the AMD website, installing graphics driver with those driver packages where they swear about always finding the perfect driver (version) for the installed hardware, uninstalling it with this eternal good ultimate clean graphic driver uninstaller, doing thousands of restarts assuring that there isn't a single bit in the whole ecosystem, isn't doing its trick. So, the laptop feels right now like those good old windows xp times, where you have to install the graphic drivers first to get the smooth desktop feeling e. g. moving a explorer window or such (not to mention the choppy video playback). I've plugged a TV via HDMI to the laptop, but when the black screen happens, nothing is showing.
So, I've decided to roll back the BIOS update hoping this might help but it wasn't. Checked the HP website and saw, that there was an even newer BIOS version, I've used. Easy thing, I did another BIOS update to the newest version available, but the problem persists.
I started all hardware check ups. SSD Drive in a good SMART condition, some errors in the data system found due to hard restarts but chkdsk /f /r does the trick. RAM memory fine (memtest), opened the laptop and reseated them just in case. Not much of dust in there either. Graphic cards test, working fine. Checked all connectors, but they were fine so far.
Occasionally the laptop is generating BSoD with the wildest error messages. Once, it's the hard drive, then, it's the graphics card, then it's the RAM memory. Then it's losing programs e. g. Google Chrome which needs to be re-installed to start the browser again, sometimes, it's ultra slow like a hardware didn't got initialized by the mainboard. Hard to explain, but I hope this gives some experts out there an idea.
As you can see it's quite unstable https://pasteboard.co/iIdDlhwcd3Ee.png
There are no virus, trojan horses, rootkits, spyware or anything else on the computer, the last check up was yesterday with highest heuristics making alarms even the laptop just thinking in catching something. The problem with the black screen existed before an Anti Virus program was installed.
Attached 5 minidumps: https://www.sendspace.com/file/065wht
I'd love to hear some suggestions but nothing regarding a "re-install Windows". It's not possible yet as I'm in the middle of a payroll.
Good luck.
Stefan