Issues with Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a HP 8560w laptop

Just a quick post this time:

imageI’ve been running Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my main laptop, which is a HP 8560w laptop.It even says EliteBook on the back so definitely a good workhorse for most of my SharePoint needs.

Everything ran mostly smooth after removing Windows 7 and switching to Windows 8 Consumer Preview. I hate using virtualization on a desktop, but I wanted to try out Hyper-V 3.0 also.

After a few weeks my laptop started acting up. Random reboots, and system halts whenever I’d put it to sleep or hibernate. Not good, Windows – definitely not acceptable.

I wasn’t sure what caused the issues, since the error codes didn’t give a specific reason, just the typical IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors.

The reason could be one of the following:

Running Hyper-V 3.0 on a laptop – not a far-fetched thought. Considering there were some slight issues to get Hyper-V running when your regional settings are not US English, this was my first suspicion.

Any of the random hotfixes Microsoft pushes through Windows Update – There were plenty, and I wasn’t really sure which of them did what. Didn’t have time to investigate.

IIS + SharePoint + SQL Server 2012 – These are fairly well-behaving citizens on the operating system so I didn’t inspect these further.

3rd party hardware drivers – Mostly I used native Windows 7 64-bit drivers from HP’s support site. A few were Microsoft’s own (apparently experimental) drivers and a few from vendors.

Eventually the issue boiled down to NVidia’s drivers. There’s a nice write up on this at istartedsomething.com but the fix is not nice – effectively disabling most of your GPU abilities to do something doesn’t feel like a fix to me. A lot more insights at the Neowin.net forums here.

So for now, I’m back to Windows 7 on my laptop and hoping for Nvidia to come up with a proper release for their GPU driver. Alternatively I could go back to the Intel GPU drivers available here.

4 thoughts on “Issues with Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a HP 8560w laptop

  1. Hi Jussi,

    Had similar issue with my HP, it turned out that the failing component was the NVidia graphics drivers. My workaround: install w8 with no internet connection, do manual check for updates, disable the proposed NVidia driver update.

    Tx,

    Adam

  2. Jussi,

    have a laptop just like you, good to know.
    I’ve had no issues w. W7/W2008R2 so far,
    but then again they’re not beta s/w, so it is expected.

    Thanks for trying things out, will keep this Nvidia driver
    discussion in my mind when upgrading to W8.

    -Ville

  3. i have the same problem
    i install Windows 8 than when i reboot the laptop i see black screen
    i dont install any thing ; where is the problem ?

    1. Hi Seghier,

      Are you installing the RTM? Make sure your hardware is actually supported from HP’s side. We’re seeing some issues with older HP laptops, they kind of work but not really for Windows 8.

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