The short story
When I connect my laptop to my external displays and turn it on it shows the HP Automatic Repair Screen and then he just stops.
When I connect my laptop to my external displays when it is already turned on everything keeps working, only at around one frame per second.
My laptop also can't restart when they are connected, it will just show a black screen with weird horizontal lines, like the gpu is doing weird stuff. This is not a huge problem as just shutting down and then turning it on again does work.
My displays
- I have an old Dell with a resolution of 1024x768 @ 60 Hz, this is connected via a vga cable and a vga to usb-c converter, this was delivered with the laptop. I don't know the exact model.
- I also have an LG 24M47VQ with a resolution of 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz, this is connected via a hdmi cable.
The long story
About four months ago I bought my HP ZBook G4 from my university. I already had a preloaded image and some assessoires, among them the vga to usb-c converter. From the first moment on I connected my display I had the problem of low frames per second, however for some reason it only showed up with some programs, for example task manager and whatsapp, but chrome was unaffected. I could work around this problem by shutting down my laptop and then turning it on again (because I couldn't restart) with just the dell connected and when it was ready also connect the LG.
Then about a month later I needed to turn of the hyrbrid graphics and turn on the discrete graphics only. This was because we needed to boot of a usb stick to takes courses. This solved my problem.
Two weeks ago I needed my Nvidea card so I turned it back on and all hell broke lose. There was nothing wrong with my laptop without any external screens. However when I connected it to my monitors and turned it on I went into automatic repair and I also couldn't connect them when it was on because then my frames were bad. A friend of mine had the same problem with the fps, not with the automatic repair. He said that you needed to disconnect all the displays, then press the powerbutton for 15 seconds, plug everything back in and then turn it on, then it all worked again. This worked three to four times for me, after that it also went into automatic repair after I pressed the powerbutton long.
I searched on the internet and found two error reports for the ZBook G4 from HP, these described my problems pretty well.
1. https://support.hp.com/bg-en/document/c05525004
This the same as my problem with the framerate, expect that mine doens't return to normal after a few seconds. I tried all of the resolutions and none of the worked.
2. https://support.hp.com/sg-en/document/c06064796
This is a pretty accurate description of my booting problem. Scenario 1 happened in the beginning after reboots, only then on my LG, this is my main display, the lid of my laptop was closed. I have never seen scenario 2 happen. Scenario 3 happens always when I boot up with external screens, it shows the HP logo, then shuts down and goes into automatic repair. Scenario happened to me as well before I started using only integrated graphics, however my screen flashed a few times and then just booted up normally. In the resolution they say that you need to turn of legacy mode and turn on secure boot. I checked my UEFI and legacy mode was turned of and secure boot was turned on.
What I already tried
Yesterday I did a memory and long storage check in the UEFI, there were no problems discovered. For some reason my laptop went throught he automatic repair (this after about one minute and before I waited as much as ten), but there was also nothing. I checked for driver updates and found some for the integrated graphics and my LG, but these also changed nothing. I updated windows but this also didn't help. Today I also went to the helpdesk at my university, they connected my laptop to a screen there through a vga to usb-c adapter and a vga to hdmi adapter and it worked fine. This was after the laptop was already booted.
I don't know what else I could try. Any help would be appreciated.
Edit 1: I just posted this message and then I got a blue screen of death. I don't know if it's related or not. After the blue screen windows restarted and now everything is working fine again. I don't know the problem. All this happened without any external screen connected.
