This is a beautiful laptop and it has excellent performance. It's only three week old; however, the screen intermittently flickers then goes black with no notice and no way to get it back. Power Management for when to dim and turn off the display is set to never. This has occurred while editing a Word document and browing the web. There seems to be no logic to when it occurs. It can happen after one or two hours of use or after 8 hours of use and sometimes we get a day it doesn't happen at all. When the screen flickers you can lift the laptop and tilt it forward and the screen will come back - sometimes; if you tilt backwards it goes black (makes no sense). The driver for the GT 230M is Version 8.15.11.8644. Tech Support had me remove and reinstall the driver, a necessary first step, but I have little hope that will acturally fix it. The only real change we've made was in the BIOS to allow virtualization. We left the C:\ drive as delivered with Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and use the second drive for Windows 2008. In Windows 2008 you must use the Generic Windows VGA driver and that never flickers. Nvidia has a Dec 2009 driver, but it doesn't appear to be supported by HP. Any ideas?
Sounds like a defective video card or a loose hardware connection (display cable or video card). If you are still able to return it and order a brand new one, I would take this option.
In my three attempts I never had a good experience with the HP repair services. Despite this, I would demand a repair if you are unable to get a new machine.
Be prepared for them to wipe your drive with the original OS and HP crapware (back up your data).
We sent the laptop back to HP. We reloaded the OS, replaced approved drivers and the problem kept getting worst. It would even flicker and go dark before Windows booted. It's flustrating to be forced to recovery to wipe out your OS drive when the problem is obviously a hardware failure. Even so the end results are a repaired laptop that works. We'll wipe out the partitions and ghost our original image back onto the hard drive. The repair sheet didn't say what they fixed other than the box display was checked. The driver installed on the laptop was the same one from before so whatever they did it was hardware. We're glad to have it back.
Nice, at least they fixed on the first try!