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    XPS M1210 display problem

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by var, Aug 3, 2008.

  1. var

    var Newbie

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    I’ve owned a Dell XPS M1210 (2 GHz Centrino Duo with 2 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce Go 7400) for a little over a year. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium; However, I quickly updated it to Windows Vista Enterprise and subsequently Windows Vista Enterprise SP1. A few days after I upgraded to SP1, I started noticing BSODs inside nvlddmkm.sys and was never able to get it to work with the numerous NVidia drivers I tried installing. [1]

    A more disturbing issue however, is that I started noticing that the display on the machine would refuse to turn on sometimes. The CPU, disk lights and the Sound buttons in front of the keyboard turn on but screen wouldn’t.

    Meanwhile, I also noticed that vertical blue lines show up in a small square patch near the cursor just before the machine crashes. Sometimes when I restart after a crash I see these vertical blue line patches in the entire screen.

    I ran dell diagnostics and it does not report any error. I updated to A08 BIOS but that didn’t help.

    Recently I installed Debian Etch/Lenny with the free drivers (that can’t do 3D) and it has been working fine for a week now. Today I upgraded to the non-free NVidia drivers and it crashed when I tried to run compiz (3D).

    I haven’t been able to get the display to switch on ever since. Like I mentioned earlier all the other lights turn on and I see disk activity but no display. The weird thing being - the display works just fine as long as there isn’t a crash (I can suspend to RAM / Hibernate and resume without any display problems). Once there is a crash and I hard-reboot it, the display doesn’t work until it magically comes back sometime later (the longest so far being one night).

    I’m yet to connect it to an external display and check.

    I just wanted to check if anybody else has had these problems. Any help appreciated.

    Thanks.

    [1] the most stable driver I could get working was a Microsoft WDDM driver (21-08-2006). The newest driver I tried installing but blue screened was the latest NVidia driver from the Dell website 174.31 WHQL.
     
    var, Aug 3, 2008
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  2. johnny13oi

    johnny13oi Notebook Evangelist

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    A friend has a Inspiron E1705 with similar problems and it turned out to be a bad video card. The video card on it died.
     
    johnny13oi, Aug 3, 2008
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