NX860XL Video card, screen, dead?

I have a NX860XL that has had problematic video since the start. I has a nvidia go 7900 gs. When I bought it (w/vista) in '07 there were a lot of problems with certain software packages, and the common belief, was the poor driver in Vista.

At some time in '09 lines began began to appear intermittently on the screen, and on a regular basis I'd come back to the computer and find the "recovered from video driver failure" message.

At any rate, recently windows updated the driver and the machine crashed. Reboots, rollbacks, removal and reloading did nothing. Now, with any nvidia driver on the machine it halts. However, it works in safe mode, and now with no nvidia drivers the machine works but in lower resolution and there are speckles all over the screen. I read on another forum some one with similar problems and replacing the 7900 gs vcard fixed it. However, I'm unsure if it is the vcard, the screen or both. Any ideas?

Thanks

 

I would first check the obvious, card seated good, cable to display seated good. Might be difficult but try to find another card to test. Personally I don't think its the screen the symptoms just don't add up to a bad screen and you can replicate the problem by changing resolution.

When it halts, do you get a blue screen with an exception error? The error code might tell you if its a hardware issue. I had a simular problem but with WIFI, stopped working one day and after removing the driver and reinstalling, I kept getting blue screens and it was a hardware exception error. Replace the card and all it now good. Your situation would be a bit expensive though, I could'nt find that card for less than $180.

 

Thanks for the response. I think you are right, but $180 is a lot of money to test. Still, if I can fix the computer for that price it's pretty cheap to have a good backup laptop. Where did you find the price for $180. Was is on ebay or other another site?

 

Yeah, currently there is one on ebay for $189:

GTW NX860XL NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 256MB VIDEO CARD - eBay (item 390202018420 end time Jun-27-10 09:36:03 PDT)

Make an offer, maybe you can get it cheaper.