XPS M170 with Go 7800GTX and 167.51 drivers

[Jonathanchitty]

Hi all, long time since I've posted here.

I've just purchased a Dell XPS M170 with the Nvidia Go 7800 GTX - and it worked fine for a few hours.

Anyway, I wake up this morning...and start to play STALKER...and the game loads incredibly slowly...so I restart...then the game loads fine...but immediately I notice LOTS of artifacts and tearing.....and then the computer turns its self off to prevent damage.

Loads of restarts now...I can only really get it to work - unfrozen - in VGA mode now...and even then, the screen is misalligned and covered in artifacts...i'm using a second laptop to find the links to new drivers.

I've only seen the Blue Screen of Death once...and it indicated a problem with NV4_disp.dll

I updated to the recommended drivers from the Nvidia site...167.51 I believe, so I wasn't expecting any problems.

PLEASE don't tell me I've blown the GPU already.

Specs are 2gb ram

Pentium M 2.13 Ghz

Nvidia Go 7800 GTX (256mb)

Any help would be gratefully recieved.

Thanks guys.

[Jonathanchitty]

UPDATE:

I've now managed to get my XPS M170 working in 1900*1200 res, and the level of GFX distortion is lowered..i've achieved this by getting the drivers from the DELL website....78.30 i think. There are still major problems though.

I'm experiencing lines all over the screen...it seems to be a repeating corrupted image of what is on the screen - and also some sort of redraw error.

Again any help would be greatly appreciated. I have no idea what could be causing this.

[Michael Marley]

Sounds to me like your graphics card may be shot. Try running the Video Memory Tester referenced in the News page of this forum.

[Andrew55]

The big question here is: Do you overclock? After you have answered that I can probably give you an idea of what you should do.

[Jonathanchitty]

Thanks for your responses.

Regarding overclocking - I wouldn't even dream of OCing a laptop that is still under warrantee. The drivers I've installed on the laptop - in this order - are as follows: 167.51 from Nvidia (then the problems started) 82.21 wtih modded inf from this site, the the offical dell drivers - release 78.30 from the dell website.

As far as I'm aware, none of these drivers overclock by default. It was the standard modded INF that came with 82.21 from this site...not even the performace ones...and i only picked these ones because they appear stable in other people's posts.

Using the dell 78.30 release I can now occasionally get the laptop to work without corruption on the screen....however it reappears before too long.

I'm getting the message on 3dmark03 that the window cannot 'focus' when the corruption is visible...i don't know if this info is any good when diagnosing the problem. The computer will sometimes run GFX intensive applications for up to half an hour before the corruption reappears....but sometimes it appears straight away...even on the BIOS screen. I played stalker for about 45mins yesterday before the corruption reappeared.

My uncle is a hardware engineer and he is convinced that it is a heat issue affecting the timing of the memory chips on the card.....the only thing I would say against this is that it woudl not explain why sometimes the card will work for half an hour running GFX intensive applications....and sometimes it will distort from a cold boot.

My best guess is that the GFX card is fried.....It's refurb laptop from NDC.co.uk and I was amazed at the price I got for it. I can guess why the computer was returned to base...

Out of interest, has anyone had any good/bad experiences with NDC? has anyone had to return a laptop to them.

Once again guys, thank you for responding to my posts. I'd taken the weekend off from work/girlfriend/football to play with my new toy and now I just feel like breaking it!

[Michael Marley]

It does sound like a fried video card... Sorry.

[Guest jonathanchitty]

It does sound like a fried video card... Sorry.

Yeah, does sound that way.....I packed it up and sent it back to NDC today - they were insistant that they would either fix it, replace the graphics card or replace the laptop (and if they don't have an XPS M170 with 7800 GTX in it they will send me a better one) so I guess it will get sorted eventually.

For the few hours I had it working it was a lot of fun....seriously fast when compared to my P4 3.06Ghz and 64MB Go 5300.

Thanks for the help anyway.

[Michael Marley]

I hope they can work it out for you. I also hope you end up getting something better ;-)

[Guest Harry]

I hope they can work it out for you. I also hope you end up getting something better ;-)

First, shame on NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Dell for not being able to help with this issue! I have been working on this for over a week now and thanks to postings on several sites, I was able to resolve it. But, it was resolved by pure chance and not really by the instructions that I tried to follow to the letter.

I own a Dell XPS M170 laptop with 2GB memory, Windows XP Service Pack 3, Intel Centrino 2.26 GHz processor, and NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX. By the way, I don't use any games. The problem started when I started downloading videos from my Panasonic DV camcorder.

Like everyone else, my laptop screen started to show digital remnants and flickered. One day the computer crashed and when I rebooted, I saw the Blue Screen Error message that identified the nv4_disp.dll as the problem. So, my quest for a solution started. A call to Dell tech support turned out to be useless. Searches in Nvidia's and Microsoft's forums gave me some clues, but the problem persisted (I updated drivers, etc.).

Yesterday, I decided to unistall the NVIDIA drivers once more and update them. Before doing that, I downloaded Driver Heaven's Driver Cleaner. (By the way, it's not a free download. You have to pay $9.99 to register in order to use it!). So, I proceeded:

1. Removed the NVIDIA drivers through the Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs.

2. Restarted in Safe Mode and launched Driver Cleaner to remove any remnants of the drivers (I selected NVIDIA and NVIDIA Control Panel).

3. In Safe Mode, installed the NVIDIA drivers from the Dell Drivers and Utilities CD that came with my computer. (I decided against using the updated drivers from NVIDIA because earlier attempts did not help.)

4. Rebooted in normal mode.

[i'm not sure of the order of the next few steps because I was responding to error messages that kept me from following my original path.]

5. In response to an error message from Microsoft, I downloaded Dell's Driver Reset Tool.

6. Launched the Driver Reset Tool and reset my drivers.

7. Rebooted and all seemed well. But, things started going wrong within a half hour or so.

8. Rebooted in Safe Mode with Networking and downloaded RegCure (which is not free either since you have to pay $39.99 to register it in order to use it.) It reported almost 2,000 errors on my hard disk!

9. After launching RegCure and cleaning up my disk, all seemed well again for a while. The display went haywire after I attempted to change its resolution.

10. I decided to launch RegCure again and clean up the disk (all of the above were performed with much difficulty since the display kept on flickering like crazy!). RegCure reported almost 200 errors.

11. After fixing the disk with RegCure, I rebooted and everything was resolved!

So, in the final analysis, the saving grace was the error message from Microsoft that led me to download Dell's Driver Reset Tool. Also, Driver Cleaner and RegCure made all the difference (I ran Dell's PC Tune Up, I defragmented, I ran Diagnostics by pressing F12 before Windows launched, etc.). My computer has been stable and running beautifully for the past six hours and I hope this is the end of it. I decided to post here because I found the advice given here most helpful and I hope that this posting helps other people who are experiencing this problem.

Thanks to all the people who post good advice on this site!