wierd problem on my m17x

hey guys,

Im hoping you can help me out with this. my computer screen will go dark (alienfx lights are on tho) and nothing i can do besides doing a hard reset will fix it. whats wierd is i have it set on not to sleep at all and for the screen not to go dark at all. im running a07 bios and the dell beta 8.73 drivers

any idea what could be happening?

 

If you have the 5870 crossfire cards the beta Vbios may solve that issue, and you will be able to use sleep/battery without problems.
To install the Vbios, read this. Make sure once you DL the new vbios, to run the utility as many times as needed until you get a window named: "ATIWinflash" saying BOTH adapter 0 and 1 are "Flash aleady programed" and only then, can you choose to restart the computer.

 

a new update on the problem. now it wont let me install the dell 8.73 beta driver when i do and reboot i get a blank screen with a mouse thats frozen any idea?

 

I'm going to cross post this, because I'm sure it will help with your issue as well, and I posted it in another thread a min ago. Lazy and down want to retype it, plus its past my bed time

Here goes the copy and paste:
Turn on, boot into safe mode, then go to "device manager." Once there go to display adaptors, and right click on the ATI card or cards, and click unistall, but check the block to delete your drivers when its done. Probably only have to do it on the first card. Then uninstall the second GPU. Then restart. Boot into windows in regular mode, and reinstall your GPU drivers. Probably found in the dell C:drive/dell And it's one of the numbered folders. Open each one till you find the ATI setup, and reinstall them. Then when it's done restart. That should clear up your problem and worked for me. Seems like when the battery goes down like that it kills the GPU driver. Not sure why, didn't investigate much. Good luck and let me know if it works. Worked for me and it's fairly quick unless your using non dell ATI drivers, then it should still be the exact same process but you may have the driver setup application somewhere else.

 

thanks guys that fixed it, heres another question how would I tell if my graphics cards are fried? would it just not boot?

 

yea, it wouldn't boot into windows if the gpu was friend and it loaded the gpu drivers. It would load in safe mode. You would also get a lot of artifacts on the screen if it did happen to load