Giles 0 Posted June 28, 2004 Sometimes when I boot up the screen on my Dell inspiron 8500 laptop shows a three quarter size color window and a quarter is blacked out. I can log on but the problem persists. I have gone to the display in control panel to change the resolution sometimes this works but sometimes it turns the screen white and then I'm stuffed. The only thing I can do then is to reboot by holding down the on/off button but then when I boot up again the screen goes white and stays white. After 10 attempts (approx) the screen will go back to normal. I have tried tilting the screen, booting with battery and mains, and throwing it accross the room. I thought perhaps it was something to do with the graphics card, I have an NVIDIA GeForce4 4200 Go (Dell Mobile)display adapter and I think the driver is up to date, perhaps it is the monitor. Pls help, it scares me when I see no reason for it working sometimes and other times it boots with bombalated screen/. Regards Giggi G Share this post Link to post
Sampson 0 Posted June 28, 2004 Since this is an "intermittant" problem and because it is a notebook, finding the gremlin may not be easy. So ... did this start gradually happening or did it start to happen after you may have installed some new software? While there is clearly a problem with the video card and/or the drivers, notebooks are funny creatures. I had one once where the TCP/IP protocols got messed up, but the communications still worked. The A:\ drive instead got lost and wouldn't function. When all else fails with notebooks, it is time to backoff the data and either use the crash disk (or whatever Dell gave you)to reformat and start with a clean install . This is radical, but in the end you may have to do it anyway and it might save hours of tinkering. Dell has an awfully good tech crowd. If this happened to you, it happened to others and they may have a quick fix. About Nvidia drivers and Dell. It has been my experience that leaving the original drivers alone is the best policy. Those are the drivers that were tested with the notebook. While gaming on notebooks has become more and more popular (and this is what the "new drivers" are generally meant for) I think it a kind of unspoken assumption that notebooks are for business applications. Sorry for being long winded. Share this post Link to post
