M17x Screen Went Black while Playing a Game?

Hi Guys -

I have a bad problem, and I cant seem to know what went wrong.

I was playing a game on my M17x and my screen went completly black. I had to do a Hard Power Down. All I was doing was playing a game? I had the game running for 9-10 hours playing?

Do you know what could of went bad? And what can I do about this? I dont have complete care warranty, just the standard warranty so im kinda worried.

I have a single 260M Nvidia card. I also had the stock dell game card drivers installed.

 

if your computer wont turn back on then the video card might of died. same thing happened on the m15x when i was playing tf2. the screen just went black out of no where and it stopped working. had to replace the gpu to revive it.

 

Sometimes if a driver encounters a problem, it will attempt to recover itself. What I have done rather than a hard power down in the past:

- Establish if laptop/PC has locked or not - try CAPS/NUM-LOCK Keys - do they respond? If not then system has indeed locked so hard power down (Power button for 3+ secs required)

- Try closing the lid, and wait 15 secs to see if system goes into Standby mode (Alien-head will pulse). If it does, then turn laptop back on. Does screen recover back to Login?

- If no luck, try the Keystroke sequence required for Shutdown (may vary depending on how you have it setup)

E.g. Windows Key -> Right Arrow x 2 -> Character for shutdown

(Check this out for your system beforehand, but is a great thing to try out in case you are 'blind' and need to shutdown)

As for fixing the original problem, it may just have been a glitch. Games often have small memory leaks which mean that after 3-4 hours, logging out and back in may noticeably help refresh the client/memory. Save Game. Exit. Re-launch.

Cheers

Trelawney

 

My screen will still not go on.

Do you think im stuck getting a new GPU, or do you think this is covered under my "regualar" warranty

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe if you are still in warranty period then Dell has to cover the repairing cost for this defective GTX 260 for you no matter which type of warranty you purchased, complete care or regular. It's not your fault. It's defective in workmanship which company has responsible for.
If you drop your M17x and cause the damage then it's a different story. In that case complete care counts.

 

yea you just have to call them up and tell them the problem. If it is the gpu you wont even have to send the laptop in. They will just send you the gpu and you just change it yourself and send the defective one back to alienware

 

strange, tried opening it up and seeing if the cables are still connected properly? long shot, but y'never know

or failing that, can you remove the 260m and boot it up, should run on the 9400m so you can see if its a problem with the screen or the 260m

edit: or disconnect the power cable and i think it defaults to the 9400m..