Bad Startup display, death upon sleeping, app...

Hi there dageezer,

Im Marty (Martyman06), and I want to thank you for your much more constructive reply than HP tech support and anyone else thinking it has something to do with my software (after probably 9 driver updates, cleanups, virus scans, defrags, etc etc, I am very convinced it isn't).

Just so you know, the laptop in question is my HP Pavilion DV9205TX, it has an Nvidia Geforce Go 7600, I have 2 cards of 1Gb RAM in it - and I think thats about all the information needed in regards to this problem... however, if you want more tech specs I can dig em out of my laptop for you if you can spare any more effort to help me out (and I would be very very grateful).

Yeah, I actually tried swapping my RAM before- my laptop worked better on that 1 occasion for about an hour or so before crapping itself again. I think I may have just re-set the ram back into its original place, but moving it seems to have provided some result.

Also, on another occasion- I uninstalled the graphics driver for my video card- and PREVENTED it from reinstalling at startup. On one occasion, I think something going by the name of an 'Intel chipset' installed itself in place of the display adapter (I saw this difference in the Device Manager), and it stopped having artifacting and startup-display problems... except at the cost of compromising the resolution to 800x600, and well, the lack of nicer graphics.

Oh, and your advice on the F12 menu thing- I do that at startup before windows loads, right? I think I need an external monitor for that because of the grey-screen issue (because it grey-screens during the BIOS loadup).

I'm actually avoiding HP tech support because they hardly seem helpful- sure they make a very keen song and dance but little other than that, I already thought of every solution they suggested already.