fuzzy Screen Vostro 1500

My Dell is out of warranty sadly.
This has happened twice recently, I'll be using the laptop, just browsing the net, photoshop, music etc. I don't play any games so wouldn't say the gpu (if that's what the problem is) has ever been under massive load.

I try to keep an eye on the temps and have never noticed them be excessively hot at any time.

It happened again today, so I ran just about every dell diagnostic test that you can use when you first start the laptop and every test passed.

I've reinstalled the video driver that came with the laptop to see if maybe it was the driver as I was using one from laptopvideo2go.

I'll clean out the fan tomorrow, which I do quite often to see if that will help.


But any ideas what it could be, I'm guessing its either the screen or the video card, which is a nvidia 8600m.

 

Try connecting to an external monitor if that helps to isolate the problem. Would be nice if there was a camera shot of your screen for us to analyze.

 

I always use Dell's drivers on my Vostro 1500 especially if i'm not playing any games. I've found laptopvideo2go drivers to cause instability issues.

Solution: download driver sweeper and have it remove all traces of your drivers and registry entries.

If your temps look good as in 36-55c degrees you should be fine GPU wise. As the previous poster said try an external monitor to see if it shows up on another screen. Honestly I think it will because unstable drivers usually cause those types of problems.

 

I'll try and connect it to an external monitor if it happens again and report back, I don't have a pic of the screen but made a quick photoshop of what it looks like.



Rodknee, yes driver sweeper is what I used when removing the the laptopvideo2go driver. The temps do usually keep in that range maybe a few degress over sometimes but then the fan kicks in and the temp drops back down.

 

You're GPU should be fine especially if you ran the GPU test from the Dell diagnostics CD. It looks like some type of driver issue and boy that would give me a headache to look at.

Another thing you could try to further isolate the driver is to boot-up into Safe Mode (F8). If all looks good with Windows vanilla VGA drivers and then if you reboot and get the same madness as before then it's further proof your drivers might be at fault.

 

Theres a little partition that has the diagnostic on it that I found yesterday, I do have the diagnostic test on a thumb drive that I was going to use but saw and used the partition first. I'm not sure if there is a newer version than the test on the partition but I wouldn't imagine it would make any difference if there were?

Yer good idea/point with safe mode, however the first time it happened the laptop automatically rebooted and the display was fine but this time, yesterday, the laptop stayed on, I was able to briefly move the cursor around but clicking on anything, pressing the windows start button on the keyboard resulted in nothing happening so had to press down on the power button. Then waited 30 secs and turned it back on and again it was fine. If it were constantly happening, then yes I could compare while in normal and safe mode.

I'm currently using an old dell driver 101.28, I did plan on using the latest one listed but for some reason even If I put in my service tag on Dell UK site, the driver for the 8600m gt is listed but when I click on it, it gives me the driver for the 8400.

 

The 8600 and 8400 cards use the same drivers as it's considered to be in the 8xxx family. It's similar to ATI and their drivers they group their drivers in a series i.e. 4600/4700/5700/5800 series etc.

See if you can get it to go into safe mode when your problem reappears as that will tell if your drivers are the culprit. Also you might want to consider a fresh if you continue to have GPU issues and nothing else is working to remedy things. Starting off fresh will quickly and surely indicate a hardware or software issue. But if you do only use Dell drivers.

 

Hi,

Yes, there is a newer version of the diagnostics tool on Dell support website. The utility allows you to update your diagnostics partition as well as you can create a bootable USB stick or CD.

Michael