Kobalt Nexus (Clevo M860TU) Video driver crashing

First of all, I am a complete computer neophyte so any directions need to be written as if you were explaining them to your grandmother.

I have a Kobalt Nexus (Clevo M860TU) and I need it to keep going for the next 5 to 6 years whilst I complete my PhD. It generally runs faultlessly but then I only use it for school and a bit of GTA IV.

System:
Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 (2.53GHz/6MB L2/1066MHz FSB/25W TDP)
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Nvidia GeForce 9800M-GT w/ 512MB GDDR3 video memory
OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD Drive
8GB Memory

Current Problem:
It does not recognise my VGA card after a fresh OS install, instead it states that I have a "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter". I have loaded drivers from the Clevo website of legacy drivers and NVIDIA's site as well. every time I load up a driver and restart, I get a flash of BSOD and then black screen and then I just do a system restore.I have not yet opened it up as I need some step by step advice for that.

Any advice on how to solve it? Am I doing something wrong installing the driver? Is the actual graphics card dead? How do I tell? Can I replace it myself....I am an art conservator use to working on delicate things with attention to detail, I just haven't done anything with the inside of a computer but I am willing to learn!

Background:
The laptop started having some issues, i.e. BSOD, the cycling between black screen and system restart. After asking around and not getting any working advice, I took it to a small, local computer shop and they did what you would expect, wiped it clean and put on a fresh install of Windows 7 Premium. BUT, the graphics card is no longer visible and the BIOS battery needs replacing but that's another query.

Many, many thanks in advance for any assistance. I want to get back and finish GTA IV!

 

hi and welcome to nbr

theres not many of us left now from the original m860tu days.
ive got exactly the same spec as you except im still running 32bit OS

firstly congratulations on having (lets hope) a working 9800GT. mine died 2 years after birth and luckily i had extended warranty so it was replaced with a more powerful 260gtx which is still going strong today.

if the card is dead i dont think you will find a 9800gt anymore so the one to look for is a 260gtx but you have to make sure it is not a dell card as they wont work in clevo's without a lot of messing with the bios. but lets worry about that later.
have you ever noticed any lines on your screen like the attached picture?

the best ever driver from nvidia back in the day is the 186.81 so try that first 64bit NVIDIA DRIVERS 186.81WHQL

newer drivers dont seem to like older cards much.

next there are 2 sets of drivers available. the original model from early 2008 and an updated version about a year later so when did you buy your lappy.

M860TU Software Upgrade

M860TU-2 Software Upgrade

these from sager in america are more reliable than from clevo direct.

the drivers have to be loaded in a certain order and you can find the order in the user manual at the bottom of the driver page.

lets try this first before worrying about a dead card.


next the bios battery.

mine does exactly the same and i havnt been bothered to update it as its somewhere under the keyboard.
i only use the lappy for emails now so all i do when i turn on is reset it each time which only takes 20 seconds.

after turning on you get 2 loud beeps. then press F1 to boot.

>click on clock in bottom right > change date and time settings > change date and time > click on august 2008 > click right arrow till 2014 > click month > click todays date > ok > ok and your done.
apply wont be clickable as battery is dead.

hope that helps so far.

 

Thank you so much for your kind and helpful reply. Yes, I figured a laptop from 2008 is approaching museum status but, hey, I'm an art conservator who prefers to listen to vacuum tube audio and 78 records so my "ancient" laptop seems appropriate. I remember punch cards and computers the size of houses...

Firstly, any chance that with care and graduate replacement of components that this old Clevo will last through my PhD (2019)? I'm devoted to it and willing to learn the mysteries of opening it up and fixing things.

To answer your question, no....the display is perfect. I've never had a dead pixel or lines or anything.abnormal. It ran GTA IV like the proverbial bat out of hell until one evening, two missions before completion, the images started to stutter and upon shutting down the game, it would not reload. Right after that I started having the BSOD but with a gentle shake, the laptop would start right up again but still refuse to load GTA IV. Even then, all other programs I use this for, Word, Gimp and pdf readers ran smoothly with no lines on screen or graphics issues.

I change the time and date regularly and off she goes, no problems. I just read online that one should change the bios battery but it sounds like quite a production, hence my queries.

I'll have a look for the user manual and give the drivers you suggest a try. And, yes, I back up everything on an external driver, have a mirror, and far too many restore points so I am ready to go!

More later....

And THANKS!

 

your welcome.
it sure is the best laptop i ever bought but my latest below has a much better screen which is amazing compared to the nexus.

will it last until 2019 hmmm, that is almost impossible to answer as they normally give a life of 3-4 years so we sure have been lucky so far.

can you download gpu-z and nvidia inspector from my link below and see if either software can see the 9800.
if not then it sounds like its cream crackered.

there still is hope though as theres the last resort of the baking method in an oven. this can resurrect the card by slowly melting the solder so the craked parts reconnect. weve had reports of it helping for a few weeks to a few years.

 

Well, I have read the manual but not uploaded any drivers from the Sager site.

Instead, I installed the recommended Nvidia driver 186.

Upon restart, the following:
Intel welcome screen
Windows start screen
Windows screen with then froze.
See photos attached.

The blue line one is after I installed the driver. The desktop is after I ran system restore, as you can see, the display is good.

It did recognise the GeForce card in Safe mode and I did not have any screen issues.

Thoughts?

 

this is where i start to struggle now as ive not had them freezes except when my original hard drive had 2 bad sectors so im not sure what else to suggest.

 

Perhaps a new card?

Or, how could I determine whether or not my hard drive has bad sectors? That was supposedly fixed by the local repair shop. Hmmm.....

 

we had a ocz for a work laptop which packed up after about 4 months.

no idea if a sector scan does the same thing on a ssd but try HD Tune HD Tune website

and also try this SSD Life - freeware version info

 

You're going to hate this, but that's from a failed GPU.

I had an Asus G51 with a failed 360M, and... the screen looked exactly the same. If I was lucky, I would get that frizzled screen and it 'locked up'.

Most of the time, BSOD.

You're going to need to get a new GPU, sorry

You may be able to get some extra life out of it by oven-baking it, but I don't know the procedure for that, so you'll have to depend on someone else to give you pointers on it.

 

oh well, confirmed then
that still was a great life of a 9800 as they died early by the bucket load.

so i its dead then an oven fix wont make it any worse then.

The Oven Trick (repairing your broken video card with an oven) | Overclockers

just dont do what some bright spark did and put it in the microwave

so you now need to look out for a 260gtx and not a dell model.

we do have our very own NBR Marketplace but i think you need a few more posts before you can post in it.

 

Yea, that blue swirly screen at the welcome screen is a dead give-away.

You can generally tell when you're going to be boned when your computer starts randomly hanging with 'device driver reset from hang in nvidia.dll' or some crap, then you get the random system reboots/crashes, that looks like it was an application crash, then games start to randomly hang on you for no reason, and finally... *pop*.

 

Bad luck mate, Ashen-Shugar's right I had the same card and had the same thing happen.

You're also probably not going to like the next part...getting a 260m GTX nowadays that is compliant for Sager/Clevo is like finding an oasis in the desert. It took me about 7 months of scouring around eBay, reddit, NBR and various other places. Clevo offered to sell me one brand new at full 2008 retail price of $450 but that seemed ludicrous.

I'd suggest trying the oven-bake trick. It gave me an extra 3 months of life from the card before finally kaputting, though your mileage may vary.

Anyway, as DJ said, the 260m gtx is the best card you can get, but the FX 3700m is serviceable so long as you're not trying to crank out some really punishing games which I don't think GTA IV is.

In terms of lasting you till 2019, my second piece of bad news, is in my opinion probably unlikely. No doubt this is a tank of a laptop and its taken multiple beatings by me (and still going) but even I'm thinking 2015 will be its last legs. So far I've replaced the HDD, RAM and GPU (as well as re-pasting a few times) as they've all failed at some point. I'd also advise buying a laptop cooler as that'll help extend the life a little more.

 

Hi MCA1928, I think what you can do is try to reflow the 9800 ( well if you can find someone who can reball the chip all the better) If this is the same problem as the Nvidia chips in the past, the thing you're going to worry about is the type of solder you will be using. If my info is correct they tried a lead-free solder for that particular generation of Nvidia chips which doesn't respond well to overheating. I had an HP with a fx5200 chip before that had the same problem but was fortunate to find someone to do a reball with leaded solder.

Regarding the m860tu it is really one hell of a machine. I never expected it to be so durable despite the fact that i am running a QX9300 chip which i am still currently using. You can find a similar chip on aliexpress for a just over 250USD by the way, a recommened upgrade, it felt like a new machine. I am right now running at 3.99 ghz with watercooling, without water cooling its stable enough for 3.72ghz @1.3125v. I did some useful mods as well for further cooling just take a look at my other posts were i exchanged the external battery into another laptop fan that blows air into the GPU, this mod might be useful for you.

This machine really takes a beating from me, i use my sager for architectural design and rendering which i would say is very demanding, and surprisingly the m86tu is holding up very well. So if you're wondering if the m860tu is future proof? I would say mine is, for my use. But until when? I think that depends on what you're gonna use it for. I think this can still last a while, no defects or problems whatsoever ( except when i blew one of my coils a few months ago, and it really smoked hehe, overclocked to 3.48ghz while rendering 3d interiors. but now it's fixed and runs ever better!) and the display aspect ratio (16:10) is better in this laptop than the regular FHD screens at 16:9.

But since the P751ZM is being released soon, i am hoping i can upgrade to that one hehe. We'll see

Tristan

 

all good advice above.
except for my battery packing up within a year (warranty replace), 9800gt after 2 years(warranty replace) and WD 320gb hard drive(just under 3 years warranty replace) everything else has been fine. only time its had new thermal paste was when card was replaced. never got too hot and hardly caused any other problems. looking at it it still looks brand new even though its over 6 years old and counting.

as the saying goes "they sure dont make them like they used too".

anyway, back on track.

give this place a go for parts. they may well be able to get a 260 even though it most prob wont be new clevoweb, the one stop source for all clevo and clevo brankded product spares and repairs

 

No, gentlemen (or ladies?) I'm not sad at all! A failed GPU is a lot better than a failed SSD (although that is still under warranty) or motherboard. That is great news!


So now onto GPUs....

What will be the best reasonably priced replacement allowing me to play GTA IV? Will I be able to play GTA V on this machine or is that a complete longshot?

Can a highly motivated but non-technical person (me) attempt the removal and replacement myself? I have a fear of computer repair places.

Thanks again, y'all have been most helpful.

 

as i said a 260gtx would be best for gaming but its finding one.

a oven bake should keep you going while hunting a new card. first check out link above.
ive never removed a card before but the experts can do it in 10-15 minutes so taking it slowly it should take no more than 30-40 minutes.

i will try and hunt down a youtube video on replacing gpu. there was one for our model about 5 years ago but its finding it.