Previously I talked about how Sony Vaio laptop’s have the hardware assisted virtualization (VT) flag locked off, which means no Hyper-V. I took the Sony back and spent 2 hours at Best Buy with the wife looking for a new laptop (I really wanted her to see what she was getting), and settled on an HP dv7-nr1025nr.

• P8400 Core 2 Duo
• 4 GB of Ram
• 320 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
• NVidia 9600 GT 512MB
• 17” @ 1680x1050
• Altec Lansing Speakers w/Subwoofer (these actually sound good in a quiet room).

Overall, a solid machine, and the wife really liked the 17” display, as she realized the larger display would allow for more content on the screen at one time, which is good when doing remote tech support (which is what she has to do sometimes). I still like the physical characteristics of the Sony, but at least HP doesn’t cripple the processor, and the video card is a lot better.

Upon arriving home, I see a Dell flyer in the mail advertising Studio 15 and 17” laptops with discrete video cards on sale, and promptly throw it away, thinking “don’t need this anymore”. I plug in the HP and turn it on, and am greeted with a blue screen, stop code 0x7E. No problem I think to my self, probably a bad driver or something, I’m going to reformat anyway. I actually executed the built in system restore so I could create restore DVD’s, allowing me to reclaim all my HD space.

After the restore DVD’s were complete, I ran memTest86 for 12 hours and then proceeded to install Windows Server 2008. No problems, got everything installed, hyper-v running, all is good. Since Hyper-V disables standby and hibernate, if you leave the laptop unplugged while running, you will drain the battery, which is what the wife did  Tuesday night. We plug it in, turn it on, and bam, blue screen, stop code 0x7E, now that’s interesting I say to myself. Turn the machine off, wait 30 seconds, turn it on, works perfectly. Shut it down, reboot, update the bios, etc, working fine. I decided to shut it down before I went to bed as a “final” test, and was rewarded with a 0x7e blue screen the next morning.

I spent some time analyzing the MEMORY.dmp file using WinDbg, as I’ve always wanted to try that out, but I couldn’t figure anything out. Usually you should see some type of driver implicated, but I didn’t. I made the decision that it just wasn’t worth it to screw around with this problem on a new computer, so back to Best Buy I went.

When I returned the Sony, I said I didn’t like it, and no questions were asked (maybe cause I said I was going to do an exchange). This time I said it doesn’t work, and my reward for being honest was a 10 minute detour to the Geek Squad bench to have them “check it out”. After explaining 3 times to the “technician” what the symptoms were, he promptly says “I think I know what it this, it’s a bad video driver”. I knew better then to open my mouth, and just let him turn it on, and the laptop did not disappoint, it blue screened on cue.

So I’m thinking to myself, sure wish I had that Dell flyer I got last week. Thankfully Dell finally has the Studio laptops with the discrete video cards on their site (again), so I think I’m going to go with one of those. At this point I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the extra $$ to go with the uber 1920x1200 RGB LED display or not. They also have the Mini 9 for $99 deal, and I can’t pass that up, although I have to add an extra $125 to get 1GB of ram and the 32 GB SSD.

Look for a future post on how this all ends, and a review of the Mini 9.