HP Vista driver downloads

[mysterie]

Hey you don't even want to know the issues I have through my company. I work for a large telecommunication company that offers internet service and my team needs a Vista Machine to help our techs troubleshoot. Our IT guy called our corporate IT people for a copy of Vista for a machine and the gist of what they said was "Vista?!? Uhmm, What's that?". I sure hope they was joking. *sigh* Heck I am the only one on our team with a Vista machine (my personal laptop) and right now the sound card driver issue is driving me nuts. I think some companies (or at least most support personnel at the front lines) would like to be more prepared but when any company has to deal with a Corporate enviroment feet get dragged like you wouldn't believe. "This has to be approved by so and so, and oh those people have to approve that first also before we can do this...blah, blah, blah"...end my reply rant

BTW I can't get Vista to just use the default drivers. After I uninstall the sound card and my computer starts up fine, after a bit it reloads the same stupid driver and does the odd blinking screen thing again (along with other issues I seem to now notice). Now I also am unable to force it to load a standard sound driver (ie when video card drivers do not work, use the standard VGA adapter, pre Vista easy repair trick). Is there another way around this? Any advice would be nice. Thanks!

Just an update: I posted all the new drivers I've caught to the first post. Nothing too exciting today, and no "Waikiki" audio drivers, unfortunately, but it's as complete as HP's FTP site is at this point.

Edit: Just thought it was cool that this thread has now been viewed over 5,000 times. I'm glad I could provide a good number of people with drivers as HP slowly gets their act together.

Now for my editorial rant:

What the hell is wrong with computer companies and software designers? I was a Vista beta-tester and have been running Vista for over a year. Their have also been puvlic beta releases and the code was finalized at the beginning of November. No one in the computer industry didn't know the status of Vista development. It was posted everywhere for years now. Why do certain manufacturers (HP, Sony, and others) seem shocked that Vista has been released, and that people want to update their systems to it. Their marketing departments sure as hell knew it was coming -- they ran commercials like crazy, readied systems for the launch, etc. But certain companies driver/software development teams now act like they had no idea this HUGE new OS release was coming, and are only working out compatibility issues now that the consumer release has already happened. This is beyond rediculous, in my opinion. My battery's dying so I'll stop ranting, but I feel better.

[JadedRaverLA]

mysterie -- Your story isn't I suppose all that surprising, but scary nonetheless. Vista's been in the works for five years and no one in upper management ANYWHERE seems to have payed enough attention to know it was coming out and prepare for the release.

As for your sound card issue -- hmm... I assume you've already tried using driver update and driver rollback. I can't fathom why one of those wouldn't let you install the standard Windows driver and then keep it. Beyond that, the only things that I can think of are using system restore to go back before the bad driver was installed and reinstalling Vista. Not the best options, but the only things I can think of at the moment if the normal fixes don't work.

[HP Fan]

HP need to hurry the **** up and release those new drivers

[AFox]

Any news on the webcam drivers for Vista 64x Ultimate, the driver on the main post dosent seem to work for me.

After that im waiting to drivers for the coprosessor, and 2 base system devices whatever they are...

Windows seems to have sorted all the rest with default drivers fine on my dv6045nr...

[JadedRaverLA]

AFox -- The base system devices are probably the card reader, or Quickplay buttons. Drivers on first post. As for the webcam, there appear to be at least two different models they've used on different systems. The one another member ripped off a system in Best Buy is the only one we've gotten ahold of so far. HP hasn't posted any webcam drivers to their FTP yet.


Edit: Updated the main post with the few new drivers today. If you use HP Wireless Assistant, there's a new version there, but nothing too exciting.

[Blocnotes]

Hi gang, I found this forum/thread searching for webcam drivers for my new HP dv6235 notebook pre-loaded with Vista. Thanks for the active up-keep jadedraverla. I’m new to the HP scene and I have a few questions. So my new dv6235 notebook came pre-installed with Vista. Most drivers were present, however some are basic, like the ricoh webcam drivers (don’t appear in scanners and cameras, or any other software, but I haven’t tried MS Messenger yet because I don’t use it), and Quick Launch buttons can’t be re-programmed. Some drivers were unstable, like the Intel wireless LAN and graphics drivers, they were actually crashing. I was able to pick up new drivers from the HP site which helped.

But, I don’t understand why we need to use HP released drivers? For example I downloaded 945GM chipset (GMA950) drivers directly from Intel and they are much newer than the HP ones, they are more stable and my performance index went up a point.

Quickplay 3.0. What is the purpose of this thing, I really don’t get it. From reading the marketing material I thought you would be able to play media on your laptop without booting into Windows. However, Quickplay, as delivered, only works from within Windows, what’s the point if Windows Media Center is present, why would anyone use Quickplay?

That brings me to all of the pre-installed crap. There is so much third party and heavy HP software installed it’s bringing the notebook to its knees. I understand HP keeps prices down by pre-installing third party software. Problem is a lot of it doesn’t uninstall cleanly, or doesn’t uninstall at all. I’m not sure why HP’s own barrage of software in on there, it’s just another layer on top of Vista’s existing functionality and it appears very inefficiently programmed. When I first booted I looked at the performance and error logs and they are filled with errors and warnings dating back to December, obviously HP’s doing, and the same errors and warnings keep occurring, a bunch during startup and shutdown.

Since Vista is now installed with a drive image, the recovery partition uses the same technique; it’s an image of a pre-installed Vista drive with all of the software already installed. This means I get no installation options, no way to get a clean system. I’m going to borrow a clean Vista DVD and install that (using my notebook’s product key), but my question is do I need any of the HP/third party software, is any of it actually useful? I’ve managed to extract all of the software from the recovery partition using Microsoft’s ImageX so I can always install some of it after.

Sorry for the length of this message and the rant.

[HP Fan]

the only reason were waiting for HP to release thier drivers is because we just need the Conexant high def audio driver. the old ones has bugs with vista it makes lagg at start up noob

[mystique lady]

Hi, I am new on this forum, and I would like to thank jadedraverla for keeping us up to date with the hp vista drivers.

Have you guys tried to play games with the current driver? For some reason my fps lowered drastically while playing games. Is there any way to fix this? Also, I cannot adjust the brightness of my screeen using the function key, and I've noticed that vista doesn't read the actual video memory when I go to display properties, can someone explain what's going on with the video memory? It says something like 32mb, 287 and 252. I don't know what do they mean. :/

[HP Fan]

Hi, I am new on this forum, and I would like to thank jadedraverla for keeping us up to date with the hp vista drivers.

Have you guys tried to play games with the current driver? For some reason my fps lowered drastically while playing games. Is there any way to fix this? Also, I cannot adjust the brightness of my screeen using the function key, and I've noticed that vista doesn't read the actual video memory when I go to display properties, can someone explain what's going on with the video memory? It says something like 32mb, 287 and 252. I don't know what do they mean. :/

for the FN key to work, u need to install quick launch button. u need to also install the Driver for your graphics card. intel or nvidia. go to thier site for thier drivers

[Whale]

I've installed quicklaunch drivers and I'm still having the screen brightness issue