Malibal P170HM 485M no longer showing video on laptop screen

Fellow notebook junkies,

I'm at my wits end. I own a P170HM with an NVIDIA 485M card. For the past year, I've been battling an occasional issue of my graphics becoming corrupt and needing to reinstall my drivers to fix the problem (this means a complete uninstall and driver sweep and then reinstalling). I always assumed it was a Windows issue and reloading the drivers seemed to fix it, so no big deal.

And then at one point, it began to occasionally boot to a black screen after the Windows 7 Logo comes on. I can tell everything is loading because I hear the Windows logon chimes and the machine's still running. And the screen isn't 'off' black. It's powered on because it has a slight glow.

It used to be that a hard reboot would fix the problem and it happened maybe every 3 out of 10 times. This past week, it's happened every time and now the only way I can see an image on my LCD screen is with the Standard VGA driver. I even formatted my system completely and reinstalled Windows and nVidia drivers from scratch. I used new and old versions, WHQL and Laptop2Go modified versions. Even the ones on the Malibal website. Same effect.

Interestingly enough, I just tested to see if I can pull an image from the external DVI port with both the latest nVidia driver and the Malibal website driver and I can indeed. No problem at all. But nothing seems to give me the image on the LCD unless it's the crappy Standard VGA driver.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

P.S. I'm also running the latest BIOS version and Windows 7 Professional.

 

Try uninstalling the driver for the monitor in Device Manager, and then let Windows re-install the default driver. Also, try a clean uninstall of whatever video driver is currently installed using Revo Uninstaller or DriverSweeper, and then try re-installing the driver by itself using the Device Manager and selecting "Update Driver Software... > Browse My Computer", then find the folder that you downloaded the software to. You can then install the utility over that afterwards if all goes well.

 

Thanks for chiming in Prostar, but I've tried all of the above multiple times and have had no luck. I would assume it was a hardware issue if the DVI port didn't work, but who knows... Hoping it's something really stupid and simple!