Contact HP Support and Customer Service | HP®*Support
Just today I've discovered that my HP Pavilion d4990y is built on an Asus P5BW-LA motherboard. Originally this shipped with Vista, and when my Win7 machine died I was able to successfully migrate the Win7 hard drive to this computer, install a few drivers and so know I have a Win7 Operating System configured for my old Dell running on a HP machine that shipped with Vista. It works, but I have lots of problems with it, and they may all be related, so I've been planning on purchasing a retail version of Win7 and just doing a brand new install, but now I've discovered that I might have a motherboard that I can reflash and erase any traces of the HP OEM (and any artificially imposed limitations they may have put on the Asus mothergboard).
I think I can do this, but I'd like help and advice. Primarily with the reflash, so that's why I'm posting it here. I know some people can get away with this, and I'd like to be one of them.
The plan is to reflash the BIOS to a standard Asus BIOS. The primary reason for me wanting to do this is not to get rid of the HP "whatever", but hopefully to increase the amount and hopefully the speed of the RAM that I can install, because I'd like to upgrade from my 32-bit Win7 O/S with 4 X 1 Gbyte RAM of DDR667, to a 64-bit Win7 O/S with (hopefully) 8 x 2 Gbyte DDR800, or whatever is the maximum speed and RAM amount I can do.
The HP site seems to say it shipped with choices that included a max of "4 GB (4 x 1 GB) DDR2 PC2-6400 (4 DIMMS)", but earlier in the specs it says the MAX is "8 GB (4 x 2 GB) (64-bit OS)".
So before I do any flashing attempts, etc... I'd like help in making certain what the motherboard is really capable of handling, with an eye open for the possibility that whatever maximum HP says is the maximum, might actually be an artificially imposed limit that a BIOS flash might increase.
I don't know if that ever happens; that flashing an OEM machine with a generic, motherboard manufacturer's BIOS can increase the size capacity or the clock rate beyond what the manufacturer's specs say it is.
If it can't (either in general, or in this case in particular), then it makes less sense for me to think about doing the reflashing part. Then, I'd like to figure out how to get this machine to run Win7 64-bit with 2 X 4 Gbytes of RAM, at whatever maximum clock speed.
Hope this makes sense. I can post whatever information you might need. I just installed "Speccy" but haven't posted the result because I don't want to clutter the thread with data that you don't want.
Just today I've discovered that my HP Pavilion d4990y is built on an Asus P5BW-LA motherboard. Originally this shipped with Vista, and when my Win7 machine died I was able to successfully migrate the Win7 hard drive to this computer, install a few drivers and so know I have a Win7 Operating System configured for my old Dell running on a HP machine that shipped with Vista. It works, but I have lots of problems with it, and they may all be related, so I've been planning on purchasing a retail version of Win7 and just doing a brand new install, but now I've discovered that I might have a motherboard that I can reflash and erase any traces of the HP OEM (and any artificially imposed limitations they may have put on the Asus mothergboard).
I think I can do this, but I'd like help and advice. Primarily with the reflash, so that's why I'm posting it here. I know some people can get away with this, and I'd like to be one of them.
The plan is to reflash the BIOS to a standard Asus BIOS. The primary reason for me wanting to do this is not to get rid of the HP "whatever", but hopefully to increase the amount and hopefully the speed of the RAM that I can install, because I'd like to upgrade from my 32-bit Win7 O/S with 4 X 1 Gbyte RAM of DDR667, to a 64-bit Win7 O/S with (hopefully) 8 x 2 Gbyte DDR800, or whatever is the maximum speed and RAM amount I can do.
The HP site seems to say it shipped with choices that included a max of "4 GB (4 x 1 GB) DDR2 PC2-6400 (4 DIMMS)", but earlier in the specs it says the MAX is "8 GB (4 x 2 GB) (64-bit OS)".
So before I do any flashing attempts, etc... I'd like help in making certain what the motherboard is really capable of handling, with an eye open for the possibility that whatever maximum HP says is the maximum, might actually be an artificially imposed limit that a BIOS flash might increase.
I don't know if that ever happens; that flashing an OEM machine with a generic, motherboard manufacturer's BIOS can increase the size capacity or the clock rate beyond what the manufacturer's specs say it is.
If it can't (either in general, or in this case in particular), then it makes less sense for me to think about doing the reflashing part. Then, I'd like to figure out how to get this machine to run Win7 64-bit with 2 X 4 Gbytes of RAM, at whatever maximum clock speed.
Hope this makes sense. I can post whatever information you might need. I just installed "Speccy" but haven't posted the result because I don't want to clutter the thread with data that you don't want.