E1505 WSXGA+ Troubles and System Restore

Hello everyone,

I just received my Dell E1505 with WSXGA+ (UltraSharp and TrueLife). Everything is great, except two things.

1) When running the screen at 1680 x 1050 resolution with 32bit color depth, and a font dpi of 96 (the default), the screen "jumps" / "bounces" / "shakes" up and down. This doesn't happen all of the time, but almost always while I am using Firefox. The screen just jumps up and down very fast, about a 1/10 of an inch. If I change the font dpi to 105% or more the problem goes away. Any ideas? I downloaded some new ATI drivers from the Dell website, but they did not help. Can I get drivers directly from ATI? I have XP Media Center.

Does this sound like a driver problem, or a hardware problem that I need to be sending my Dell back for?

2) I have already used the factory restore (I believe I got into it by pressing Ctrl-F11 during boot) which brings up the Dell System Restore utility that restores the laptop to the factory settings. I was thinking about performing this restore again to see if it would fix the bouncing screen, but, now the key combination of Ctrl-F11 during boot does not work, neither does Ctrl-F12. Am I using the wrong key combination, or is something screwed up with my System Restore? I have not messed with any of the partitions, and I have not tried reinstalling Windows.

I do have the Windows XP Media Center CD from Dell, and the Sonic Reinstall CD, but they did not send me the PowerDVD cd, so I am not really ready to do the full format / reinstall yet.

Thanks,

Brandon Hauff

 

You can call to get the PowerDVD. To do the restore, you need to wait until you see the Dell screen, then hit CTRL+F11. I'm not sure if you can only use it once or if it has a limit amount of uses.

As for your screen problem, I'm not 100% sure. If it only happens with FF, i would say that it was FF or something running with FF.

 

Try finding the drivers for you video card, either from Dell or the manufacturer. Could be a buggy video card driver problem.

 

You can also just download your video driver from the Dell website.

 

Several users also go to laptopvideo2go.com to get more current drivers. Personally I like the drivers offered on Dell, but I'm not a gamer.

 

The system restore seems to be working again, who knows thy it was not working the other day.

I have downloaded the most recent graphic drivers from Dell. I will try getting some drivers directly from ATI before I reformat again.

Thanks for the help, I will keep you all updated.

-Brandon

 

It may be that you tried the key combination too soon/late. It is 'recognized' during the www.dell.com 'blue bar' screen [this immediately follows the BIOS Dell 'logo' screen]. The 'blue bar' screen is only present for 1-2 seconds so you need to be 'ready'....

Mark