Graphics, LCD dead or something else.....

Hi,

It's Been a while.. so Here is my problem.

My Alienware M15X Graphics went a bit patchy recently. Within a Minutes of Booting up, garbled graphical effects came in and made the picture unviewable.

I successfully remedied this by booting in Safe-mode, uninstalling then reinstalling the graphics drivers and encountered no further problems for about a week. Then things went South, - Now when I boot up the screen is black and dead, but I can get a working display fine through an external Monitor. Suspecting more graphical issues I looked at resetting display resolution to minimum and uninstalling drivers, then reinstalling. Now however the Laptop wont accept the drivers, the PC locks up and the card defaults as Generic VGA Device. again all this done through the external monitor...

I decided to use Standard VGA graphics when I saw I can get high enough resolutions for the Laptop to be perfectly useable (I no longer use it for Gaming) so this is quite acceptable, but his still wont run through the laptop screen however. 1280X720 I think it is managing on Standard VGA device - Its just the annoyance of using an external monitor. Again this modest setting still wont run through the laptop screen however.

So I am thinking the the graphics card must be functioning on some level well enough to send a signal to an external monitor, thereby cannot be faulty. I begin to suspect that the Laptop LCD Display must have died. I have shone a torch into the blackened (but powered up) screen and could not see any form of visible display so I think the back light is not at fault.

I would like to replace the LCD if possible, but this is all a little tenuous, could be £50 up in smoke if I have made a misdiagnosis....


The Laptop is about 4 Years Old with a AMD Radeon HD 6900M series card in. 4GB RAM and Win 7 64 Bit.

Any Ideas or suggestion are very welcome.

Cheers,


Rulakir.

 

It is most likely just a bad video card. Even though it is 4 years old, you cannot buy a laptop anywhere close to as nice as your M15x for the price of a MXM replacement part. My recommendation would be to fix what you have.

Since you do not use it for gaming any more, no need to spend a lot on a late model GPU replacement part. A 5870M or 6970M should serve your needs well enough. Even if you end up spending $300 to $500 to fix it, that's going to be much better than a $500 crackerbox piece of trash laptop from Wal-Mart or BestBuy.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Alienw...625?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item2a2e61d3f9

http://www.ebay.com/itm/For-DELL-AI...926?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35cdc4364e

...or even better, check NBR Marketplace for availability from another member of our community.

 

Completely agree with Mr. Fox. It seems like the video card is malfunctioning. When you are on the external monitor and try to install the drivers for the AMD card. What happens?

 

When the drivers are installed the card is recognized and the drivers load, then a reboot is requested - upon reboot windows locks up. After that I have to go safe mode and uninstall the drivers to make the PC useable.

I have an older card an Nvidia 240M I think it was (see my other post from 2 years ago) I upgraded from, I could switch back to that maybe to try and prove definitively if it is the card...if I haven't thrown it out.

 

Well, good news,

New Nvidia 240M fitted and worked straight off the bat,

all is now peachy and your advice was on the Money,

Thanks for the input,

Regards,

Rulakir.