Vertical Violet Lines after System Freeze - Black screen

[ricdes]

Hi people,

I'm new here but I hope you guys may help me.

I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Geforce go 7900 GS running on XP MCE SP2. It has been working pretty well for now over 1.5 years but lately I've been getting into trouble.

The thing is: I got myself need for speed pro street and my system started getting bluescreens while gaming.

The Bluescreen error was: NMI: Parity Check. Memory Parity Error.

I installed the newest drivers from here with the modded inf and got it working, at least for 2 days.

Now, since 1 week I've been getting this problems when booting up my pc. After the pc is started up, I get no image. Just a black screen. Same thing in UBuntu: When the login screen should be showing up, I get a black screen.

I only get to see something if I start in secure mode and then uninstall my nvidia drivers. so I guess this problem may be driver related. Also: Those tiny lines also show up on my external display, so it isnt display related.

I was hoping if some of you guys also had problems of this kind somewhen in the last time and maybe someone could help me not to pay dell for a new graphics card as they told me on the phone that the card is broken (but why should it be broken? It works sometimes for 2-3 days, then the system freezes and I get the errors showed above all the time... )

thanks already for all of your answers! thx rly :)

Edited December 23, 2007 by ricdes

[Bill]

Looks like your card is hosed or is overheating. Clean out the laptop completely of dust and see how well it runs without drivers installed for an extended period of time.

Do you get graphics glitches in the BIOS? (Warm boot vs cold boot?)

I have seen those lines before on Dell's, always a sign of impending graphics card RAM doom.

The good news is that laptop is easy to take apart. You can get the graphics card out to re-seat it, and clean the heat pipes, in about 15 minutes using Dell's online guides and a single philups screwdriver.

Re-seating the card is probably a good idea. Will give you an opportunity to clean out any sneaky hidden dust too.

With less than 2 years I hope your warranty is still good...