No display on startup (Vostro 1400)

Just recently I encountered a problem with my Dell Vostro 1400 notebook. When I power it up, it sits at a blank screen. The HDD activity light flashes and all that good stuff, but there is no video. I decided to try out some of the beep testing with the system and according to this it's my optical drive that's the problem, which I doubt that.

Afterward I hooked it up to my PC monitor to see if I could get any video out of it, which is what I got. Though the picture was extremely distorted with vertical/horizontal lines. On top of that I could not run my BIOS setup, Boot select or any of the other start up options. It would take forever to load and when it finished it would just be a bunch of nonsense coding.

If I let it run through the normal start up it would hang for about 4 minutes then come up with:

***Hardware Malfunction

Call You Hardware Vendor For Support

NMI: Parity Check / Memory Parity Error

***The System Has Halted***


(For the record, my warranty for the notebook is no longer active)

I know that this similar issue has come up through the forum, but I haven't come across anyone has this exact same problem.

Any help is well appreciated.

 

I fiddled around with the RAM and got windows to finally boot up. Currently I have only one stick of ram in the laptop though I haven't tried it with both. I am still encountering the video distortion though at least it's workable. Now, my current issues are:
The video distortion
Only being able to boot in safe mode

Any help on these problems would be very appreciated.

 

Hi,

This is a well-known problem with Nvidia-chips. In case you have a Nvidia GPU, then contact Dell support, even if your warranty has expired.

Michael

 

Sorry for the delayed response. Exactly how would I get any help from them without a warranty?

 

Read for more info on this: http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/...ate-limited-warranty-enhancement-details.aspx

EDIT: Had wrong link - new link is good now.