Help! Dell M1530 nVidia 8600M failure?

Hi,

My four year old M1530 had some sort of catastrophic failure last night after working flawlessly since purchase. The system froze, and upon reboot I noticed the Dell logo and boot screen was slightly corrupted. Not good! A blue screen then appeared and windows was unable to load. I rebooted again using safe mode, but the display corruption worsened and the screen is pixelated and split across the screen. It's basically unusable.

I'm not keen on buying a new laptop yet, and want to try and fix this one with a spare part. Are the symptoms above common with GPU failure?

Paul

 

Oh yea, that sounds like GPU failure. If you have a tech repair shop nearby, have them check if reflow/reball can fix it for you. (Don't have them doing it without actually checking the solder joints first).
You can also try to reflow it in an oven yourself, but i'm firmly against it.

 

Thanks. I've found a local PC repair chain that lists reflowing this particular nVidia chip as a featured service. Must be quite common!

Been having a look at the XPS 15 as a possible replacement if it's necessary - very disappointed to see customisation is now limited to peripherals, so can't get exactly what I want. Think I'll go elsewhere to buy.