Strange lines and characters across my Inspiron E1705 screen

Hi. My dell Inspiron E1705 has been giving me these strange horizontal / angular lines and dots on my screen with different characters on the text as well whenever I boot up. Have installed latest nvidia drivers too. I actually reformatted the system and installed all the drivers. For a week system worked fine and then started showing the display abnormality. Again re-installed the OS after re-formatting. When the display gets impacted even portion of the screen appears in different color. This is not limited to any one part of the screen.

Once the display gets impacted as stated, system doesn't go through the proper booting process. It takes me to the balck and while screen with the options of Safe Mode, start windoes normally, boot with last known etc, etc.

But if I select the last known good boot, still it take me to blue screen. If I try it few times with Hard boot, suddenly everything starts booting well and functioning well. But this luck lasts only for few hours.

Can anyone suggest how this issue can be addressed?

Will highly appreciate any support....

 

Wrong forum. Post in the Dell Inspiron subforum or the Hardware subforum.

 

I went ahead and moved it for you, so do not worry about making a new post.

Can you post a picture of this? If it is happening during the boot up, I strongly suspect that the video card is dying. Do you have the nVidia graphics card?

 

You sir have a faulty video card. There was a manufacturing flaw in older nVidia cards that made them overheat and die faster. Read my post here for more information.

Dell extended the warranty on some models by one additional year and released a BIOS update that limited the effect of the problem. The E1705 wasn't included in the clean-up effort. If your computer is still in normal warranty Dell can replace the card for you, and you can bargin for a different model because Dell never fixed the problem in the E1705.

 

Greg, thanks for moving the post for me under correct forum.


Gaah, Thanks for the info that you provided. I read your earlier post too. My Laptop is not under warranty. Could you please let me know whether changing the Video card would fix the problem? Or do you have any other recommendation?

Once again thanks for the info you have provided.

 

Dell extended the warranty on affected models, if I remember correctly. You might be able to call them and get it fixed anyway.

As for actually switching out the GPU. Dell used a modular GPU alright, BUT it was a Dell specific design with a Dell specific GPU card. So you could replace it but would have to find a part specifically designed for the E1705 or E1505. If you're going to take this route, I would recommend getting an ATI X1400 pulled from a E1705 or a E1505. You'll lose gaming performance, but you'll get a GPU that isn't destined to burn itself up as soon.

 

I wouldn't settle for an Radeon X1400- This card is really slow, and recent driver updates are none existant (mobility modder produces driver that crashes/doesn't install right/missing options like LCD scaling). Even the desktop and media playback suffers in my experience, compared to GeForce Go 7900.