e1705 terrible video

Hello All,

I've had my E1705 for a little over a year now. Today I installed 2 programs and afterwards tried to watch a DVD. It was horrible. The video was very jerky and some static. I uninstalled the programs thinking they were at fault. No luck. I used system restore to before the installation and still no luck. I've run anti-virus, anti-spyware, registry cleaner, updated video card driver after uninstalling with driver cleaner and still no good. I don't know what else to do! I've had trouble off and on with this sytem. When I got it I reformatted and had similar issues, along with not being able to get my wireless to work. Got it all sorted out with dell support somehow, but that was awhile ago. Ever since the notebook has been pretty fickle. Sometimes a small change and the performance goes down the drain. I've had to use system restore a couple times to get the ability to watch movies back, but this time it isn't working. I'm thinking another reformat, but honestly without dell support I'm a little nervous since I apparently screwed something up last time. Any help is greatly appreciated! Anything I can do before trying a reformat? I'm in the military and deploying Sunday for a month or more, so this is a really bad time to not be able to watch movies on my laptop!

 

Maybe a clean reinstall will help. It's all I can think of right now. You've already tried a lot that I would do.
Formatting and reinstalling isn't that hard. There are good guides for it here on the forum and on the internet.
BTW, most Dell systems have a built in recovery function that when you press a certain key combination during start-up it'll revert back to factory defaults. It's the closest you can het to new. The app is pretty user friendly.

 

Thanks, I was afraid of that. BTW forgot to give my system set up. It was 3:00AM and I'd been messing with it for too long. Here goes. Intel Core Duo T2250, GeForce go 7900GS, 1 GB Ram, and XP media center SP2. No other problems at the moment, just dvd playback and gaming performance as well. Thanks!

 

clean it up - reinstall

 

Today's my lucky day. I was browsing the dell site downloading drivers for my reformat and saw an urgent firmware update for my philips dvd. Went ahead and installed it and the thing works great now. I appreciate the help!