M17x R1 Black Screen

Hello all,

Been searching everywhere on the forums online, ran out of ideas.

Though my issue has lasted over a month now, and I'm getting extremely desperate.

I have Alienware M17x R1, Geforce 280M SLI. Reformatted my PC clean, with minimum drivers running except the chipset and ethernet driver. Have Window 7 SP1.

I keep getting black screen whatever Geforce driver I installed, from 190 series to the most recent beta (July 2013 drivers). I have tried all drivers released this year, I still get black screen after window logo & window start up.

Just pure black screen, no white cursor.

I am amble to function ok without a graphics card or in safe mode, but which ever Geforce driver I install, it dies. I tried clean install, driver sweeper etc etc.

Please help!

Thanks in advance!

Gerry

 

I couldn't be sure, but you might have burnt your 280m

 

Hi Alienscream, thanks for the reply.

But I'm using them right now...? Without a driver? It just laggy as hell and can't play any games...

 

Hi, if you have tried the latest NV drivers you may well have damaged the card and no driver now will work, I'm in the same boat right now. See: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/721878-nvidia-320-18-driver-warning.html#post9240231 for background. Problems are inconsistent from black screens to multiple BSOD's and graphical anomalies

Might have nothing to do with it but far too many 'co-incidences' for my liking

 

Hello, Gerry, could you take a look at this post and follow all the steps to install the 314.07 drivers?

I know they're a bit dated but i just want to rule out some other causes.

 

Micky! Thanks for the reply pal, really appreciate it. Goodness me! Wish someone informed me earlier, wasted 80+ hours in 9 days trying to fix this. Thats horrific! :O I believe you may be right, will study that thread more thoroughly again. Thanks again Mick for the reply.

Hello to notebookreview god! Katalin Thank you for the reply. Doing it now as I write this, will keep you posted!

Katalin, the modded nvdm.inf doesn't work, I placed it in the right display.driver folder (whilst cleaned all the registry etc).

No luck. I'm using Alienware M17x R1 Geforce 280M SLI.

Thanks

 

Glad I could help

Mine has tanked compeltly now, can't run games and it keeps black screening just in windows. No driver fixes it and I have to use safe mode to mess with the driver. Eventually found a very old one that got me into windows and I've dropped the display down to 60hz hoping I can keep it limping along until I get out of hospital and can call dell to replace the card - hopefully they wont have me jumping through hoops to realise the card had almost died altogether. With the 120hz display I have no iGPU to fall back on - never rains ...

Forgot to add, you can get driver specific .inf's from here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/drivers

The file name often changes, and when you get to the inf you have to manually save it (using the name in the URL) but they seem to work for any machine/card combo

 

That's weird. One last question before we go further: did you used it with the 314.07 verde version of the driver?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win8-win7-winvista-64bit-314.07-whql-driver.html

 

Yes, that is correct, 314.07, precisely that Katalin.

It is also strange that the .inf files aint working? :O

 

This may sound obvious but were you prompted to replace the original file when you copied nvdm.inf to "C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\314.07\WinVista_Win7_64\International\Display.Driver" ?

 

Strangely no! I usually get a pop up window asking 'do you want to replace the nvdm.inf' file, which I usually get for the older drivers!

Thanks