Weird problem on my m1710 - please help

Hi guys!

I was wondering if someone could help out.

My problem started whtn I downloaded the Last Remnant benchmarking tool from Square. I extracted the file and ran the executable. The program started in windowed mode so I thought I'd fiddle around with the options and change settings. What happened next was totally unexpected - my laptop just froze with the screen displaying a bunch of red lines.

Since it wouldn't respond to any keystrokes I did, I pulled the plug and let the system reboot again. First thing I noticed was on the Dell logo, a bunch of green and white lines were all over the screen. When the XP logo showed up, a few seconds later, the screen suddenly went blank. I thought that maybe it was just a driver problem, so I rebooted the laptop into safe mode and completely removed the old drivers and reinstalled the mobiel drivers found on nvidia's website.

In the middle of installation (the progress bar reached 50%) the screen just went dark (as if the videocard lost it's signal). I left it for around 30 mins thinking the screen would show up again but it didn't. I pressed the power button on the laptop to shutdown the computer and rebooted it again but, the same black screen showed up again. Now I'm forced to use the generic windows driver since ANY driver I install would end up with a black screen.

I thought it might have been a corrupted video bios so I flashed it with a dell 7950 go gtx bios and it still didn't clear up my problems.

I did find something strange though. I tried installing rivatuner and somehow, it detected 2 GPUs. It said GPU0 \\ (Default Monitor) and then another entry GPU1 \\ Unattached device. What gave me hope that this problem is fixable is that under GPU1, it had this entry: 256-bit G71 (A2, 24pp, 8vp) with 512MB DDR3. Could this mean that windows xp or my laptop in general might have screwed up it's video card detection?

Can anyone suggest a solution?

I really hope someone could help here. Thanks in advance!

 

sounds like your gpu may have sh!t the bed

 

Dear Brother,
A very similar situation just happened friday night with me on my M1330.
My Nvidia chip melted and a tech called me today saying the new mobo will arrive tomorrow and he will install a new one.

Dell has a fairly new one year extended world-wide warranty on the nvidia mobo problem.
Good Luck,
Chetanji

P.S. go back a few pages and you'll see a wealth of info on similar prob's!