Chosen Solution

I have an HP pavilion dv7 with a Radeon HD 6370 video card that has been intermittently crashing, but now the problem is worsening. I have scanned the various troubleshooting recommendations and have determined, to the best of my ability, that:

  1. The card crashes when the computer is cold or hot, but more frequently when the computer has been on for a few hours.
  2. Windows researched the cause of a crash a while back and informed me that the error was caused by the ATI card.
  3. I am using the most up-to-date driver.
  4. My spouse is an electrical/computer engineer and is going to replace the card if I can purchase another one. To that end, I have these questions:
  • Is the card a standalone or is it soldered onto the motherboard?
  • Is there another card that might be more reliable that I can purchase instead?
  • Where can I purchase a replacement card? Thank you.

Not being exactly sure which model of the dv7 you have, I go with a pretty generic answer. Most graphics card are embedded into the motherboard on laptops, making swapping the graphics card extremely difficult or not physically possible. Now, some laptops were fitted with a technology called “MXM” which was developed by nvidia and it allowed the end-user to remove a add-on graphics adapter and replace it with a compatible upgrade. Hope this helps, good luck.

If you asked for discrete graphics when you bought it, it should have a separate graphics card, but i’m not sure about this. The best way to find out is to get your screwdriver out and see for yourself. Here’s the repair manual: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01… Good luck!