Dell :: Think My GPU Is Dying... Need Confirmation
Feb 22, 2010
the screen went black, then returned to the desktop and reported an error with my graphics card’s driver (8600M GT with the latest driver from Nvidia 195.62 or something similar).
This process then repeated and I was confronted with the dreaded BSOD!!
So thinking something had corrupted with the driver, i booted into safe mode and began reinstalling the drivers again.
This all went fine, up until tonight when I was unwittingly enjoying some call of duty and this happened...
The screen juddered for about a second then froze on that image .....
I'm coming up on the end of my 1-year warranty, and quite a few things have started to fail on my beloved E1705, so I thought I'd make sure I know exactly what's up before I call Dell -- the last (and only) time I called them to get something (a keyboard) replaced, I was on the phone for hours. As I need quite a lot more replaced than a $50 keyboard, I'm a bit nervous.
First of all, I think my GPU's (256MB 7900GS) failing.
(I'll replace these if they're way too big -- native resolution, and I 'unno if notebookforums has a thumbnail system)
From what I've been able to gather, that would be the vRAM going bad? Points on the screen connecting to other random points and stretching the texture to get there. Also, on top of that, I get a lot of snow in loading screens, and stuck pixels (usually red) when the GPU's warmed up -- usually ~50-65C (under load). I've also noticed a performance decline, getting about half the FPS in most situations I did compared to when the PC was new (and yes, it's still clean, the HDD is pretty much empty, defragmented, drivers up to date).
Also, the main problem, is I often get the NMI Parity Error: Hardware Malfunction when playing games. It used to be 2-3 times a day when the problem first presented itself, now it's within 5-10 minutes of starting a game, rendering them unplayable. I think this'd also be the GPU?
M'kay, so on top of that, I think there's something going on with my sound port. One day my speakers just stopped working. I thought I'd messed up the drivers or software or something, but headphones worked fine. I came across an old post about the motherboard on this notebook, and it was mentioned that if one applied pressure to the headphone jack (which the headphones were unplugged), the speakers would begin to work. Sure enough, that's the case -- press on the headphone jack and audio comes through the internal speakers. So that means the port's starting to come loose? It seems like I would need to get the entire motherboard replaced?
I was wrapping up another late evening of gaming when my game froze and artifacts and red-blue-green pixels took over the screen. I was anew by this, it had never happened before, so I tried to alt+ctrl+del my way out of it and then my machine blue screened and died. I rebooted it and got the Windows boot menu offering safe mode /w networking w/ command prompt and start windows normally, etc. Except there was one ungodly thing different here, everything was misspelled. It offered me 'Start gindogs normally' among other nonsense. When I tried to boot this gindogs thing it wouldn't go past the Windows XP boot-loader and would just give me vertical lines of random colors before blacking out on me.
I tried to reboot a few more times to see if anything new would happen and I noted a few new things. The Dell logo on the boot-screen is covered with white dots and horizontal white lines.
could it be a GPU failure, or a Intel-shat-itself failure?
I am dual booting Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit and Windows 7 b7000 32-bit. The laptop has the copper mod on 7/28/2008 with very good results. It lowered my idle for GPU by 11C and full load by 21C (very good in full load). But my two recent BSOD from Vista and Win7 make me think my GPU is dying, but it doesn't have the typical vertical line problems like other owners. Likewise, it's working perfectly fine after each BSOD (until the second one in Win7).
BSOD in Vista (see attached picture):
*** Hardware Malfunction Call your hardware vendor for support NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error *** The system has halted ***
No event viewer log or memory dump available. Notice the short black bars visible on the blue background. I don't know where those bars are coming from. There are a few white words were NOT static. Some text were shifting during the photograph.
BSOD in Win7 (no picture due to automatic restart):
See attachment of mock-up made in Vista desktop. It's nowhere near what I saw, but it has a similar short strokes of light on a black background. My background was a picture of GREEN grass blades.
The second BSOD occurred while watching YouTube on the same day as the one in Vista. Basically, the screen was fine then suddenly it turned black with short strokes of color showing through where the icons are. About one second later, the screen gets to the classic BSOD blue, but this blue is black instead with the same short strokes of color. And then the laptop restarts after the memory dump, and everything is normal again including the POST.
The GPU averaged around 60C while the CPU was about 50C using HWMonitor. I never had these weird looking BSOD, especially ones with artifacts. It's the artifacts that make me more suspicious. Log file from Windows 7 below:
Quote:
Source = BugCheck, Event ID = 1001
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000124 (0x00000000, 0x857cc024, 0xf2000040, 0x00000800). A dump was saved in: X:WindowsMEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 021709-24913-01...........
My M4400 6-Cell battery goes for about 45min on full charge. Ive had my laptop for a year now. Is this normal that it dies so quickly?...
I started noticing this a week or two ago and now on startup I even get a notification saying "your battery life is decreasing, now is a good time to buy a replacement battery"...
I dont remember how long my Inspiron 8200 laptops battery lasted but it feels like this one gave in really quickly. I do use my laptop a lot. Its on most of the day....
I've heard some stories of XPS systems (m1330/m1530) imploding after 1.5 years... anyone have any firsthand/secondhand info on the percentage of these or have I just heard about a few random people who have been unfortunate enough to have had disasters?
I have the nVidia GPU in my m1330, if that makes any difference - I heard about those dying, but I was under the impression that problem popped up out of the box and not 1.5 years down the road?
It's my only computer, so I use it most of the day, but I don't game (mostly word processing, browsing, working etc) and I try to be gentle with it.
One day as I'm turning on the computer (2008 imac) somebody (not going to say who) decides to just turn the computer off just about 3-4 seconds after I clicked the power button. When I booted up the computer again many things were wrong.
1. The computer runs extremely slow, both in my windows and mac partitions, I've pretty much concluded that this is hard drive problem since it takes forever to load applications and they run slow if and when they do finally load up.
2. Boot time is much greater, takes several minutes to fully boot up either of the partitions.
So I basically try to figure out what was wrong. I perform disk repair and verify disk operations from the disk utility, and the problem persists. I reinstall the mac OS (Leopard) with the archiving option. The problems still persist. It gets to a point where I can no longer even boot into the mac partition and if I try it keeps restarting itself.
One time a no smoking sign came up without the cigarette (if that makes sense). The windows partition continues to run even slower. Sometimes I can't even log in to my account on the windows side and the computer freezes up. Eventually I ended wiping the mac partition completely and doing a fresh install of Leopard. It fixed the problem somewhat but I feel the mac isn't running as fast it was before and there are other problems. If I update to 10.5.8 the update fails with an error saying something about airport scripts.....
Is anyone aware of any issue with the touchpad on this model? For about a year now, on occassion the mouse pointer will just completely freak out (I do't know ho better to describe it). All control of the pointer is lost, it moves really fast, and shus down and resizes windows seemingly randomly. I can stop the behavior by CONTROL-ALT-DELETE, but it's a real problem. Lately it is getting worse.... And the mouse pointer has started to just freeze completely.
It is not a driver issue. I've tried changing drivers to no avail. I even completely rebuilt my machine from a clean build a month or so ago. The problem remains.
The computer is a couple years old now, but I don't put lot of junk on it so it still runs fast. And the light casing is great. I really don't want tohave to buy a new machine.
My computer is couple week old HP HDX18t. When the logon for windows Vista ultimate 64 pops up, part of the screen goes black. From the left hand side of my screen black streaks come about half way across the screen. Its almost as if my computer were turned on its left side and someone drew a line graph that was filled in black beneath the line. (best way I can describe it) It only lasts a second, then goes away. I don't seem to have any other graphics problems.
I've had my Inspiron 1420 for about a year and a half now, with virtually no problems except when dealing with Windows Vista. But, about a month ago, I was playing a very graphics intensive game and all of a sudden my screen froze, colors inverted, and it started to flash and pixelate at me. I turned my computer off, then back on, and this started happening:
I turned my computer off again and blew out all the dust I could, then let it cool down. When I started back up everything was fine again. But about a week later, it did the same thing, but for longer.
About an hour later it was fine again. A couple weeks went by and nothing like that happened again, up until about three days ago. I was playing my game again and then it started to pixelate, but I could still play. The screen would scramble, but it was almost like it would refresh every 10 seconds or so and the screen would be fine. That night, I was (again) playing my game and my screen scrambled, froze, and went to your basic blue screen.
I rebooted and everything was fine, but the next day I turned on my computer and it did the segemented screen again and when I tried to fix it, another blue screen came up saying "Hardware Malfunction, call you hardware vendor for support .....
I've owned a ThinkPad T430 for about one year now. Originally I was fairly impressed with the battery life (around 4.5 hours) but now after owning it for a year I am very unimpressed with it's short 3 hour life now.  I have read that batteries should be expected to do this, although I have friends with a MacBook Pro which has lost maybe 20% of it's charge over three years not one year like my ThinkPad!
My specs are listed below: Â OS: Windows 8 (upgraded from 7) Ram: 8GB (4*2 DIMM - came with 4GB and I upgrade it with 4 more) CPU: i5-3210M 2.5GHZ Hard Drive: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD (upgraded from the 320GB 7200RPM HDD before...if I have got those specs right) Â I recently installed the new SSD and expected to see my battery life shoot up again (hopefully at least half an hour) but I really haven't noticed any such improvement. Â I use the battery frequently for school and run the battery down to about 20% maybe twice a week on school weeks? Â Is this kind of deterioration to be expected and should I simply purchase a new battery if I need that extra 1.5 hours? Â According to the Windows 8 battery report the original full charge capacity was: 49,286 mWh, now it is: 39,780 mWh.
Is it normal that dell.ca would have fewer choices of screens than dell.com? I'm looking at the studio 15, and dell.com lists Hi Resolution/Bright,
glossy widescreen 15.4 WLED display (1440x900) as a choice, which is what I want, but dell.ca doesn't. When I view the system specs though, that choice is listed as on option.
I have a Dell Latitude E6530 and when I plugged in my monitor and keyboard into the docking station, they were not recognized. But I can plug them into the laptop while docked and they are recognized.Â
I have a Dell Inspiron N5010 purchased about 2 and a half years ago. I was just deleting some random programs which I don't ever use, and accidentally clicked on uninstall Dell Data Safe Local Back up.Â
How to reinstall it? I tried to do so by clicking this link [URL] .... but it just came up with an error message.Â
my laptop vostro 3460 won't boot any more. When I turn it on it loads the Dell logo (I suppose it passes the POST) but then it just shows a black page. It could be anything, but I guess that it may have something to do with Windows 8 and the UEFI system. I also would be quite happy to install linux mint and get rid of Windows, but I don't know how to change the boot priority order.
So my questions are:
1 is it a hardware issue ? if not, can I solve my problem easily ?
2 how can I change the boot priority order, to install mint ?
when i first got my dell inspiron and it was all good. when i set the monitor to shut off after 1 minute of being idle, it did and would not turn on unless someone moved the mouse of pressed a button. however, after i reformatted, the computer monitor would shut off after 1 min but soon afterwards it turns on again by itself, then it goes off again, then it remains on permanently. i recently formatted my laptop again and this problem persists. anyone knows whats sup? im using xp ftw... and my configurations are the same as it was before the reformats so idk whats wrong.
Why can"t I get the Dell Webcam Central to load on my inspiron 1545? I have downloaded it twice from the support site for my service tag and each time i attempt t install it and it shows a coorupt or incomplete download
i consider buying assassin's creed for pc to play it on my dell laptop (see sig). any idea, how it will run? anyone with an i9400/e1705/oc'ed 7900gs, who already played it? is it worth it or do i have to turn down the settings too much?
just for info: i can play gears of war, bioshock, ut3, cod4, et:qw, sega rally, orange box, stalker, etc. at max settings at 1280x800 res. everything runs smoothly like that. have to turn down aa or shadow qual. slightly down sometimes, though.
