Guest Halfstep Posted February 10, 2009 Report Share Posted February 10, 2009 Ok, I'm not sure if this is the right place for this. But first let me thank you for saving my laptop! Its not 100% working yet, but at least the monitor works during windows. Ok here's the story. For a while now, for some reason, when I start up my laptop, there is no bios startup at all on the screen. I have a bios password set, and luckily I remember it. But I have to know when to type it in. I was messing around a few weeks ago and trying to update all my drivers from dell. When I updated my video card, the one they gave me destroyed my laptop functionality. I had to hook it up to an external monitor to see anything. I was dismayed and called their service support.....they were useless and wanted me to send them my laptop and they would fix it for $500. Today I was fooling around and came across this site. I installed the drivers according to all the forums and stuff, and viola, I can see windows on my laptop screen. I'm not sure what's up with the bios still though, for some reason nothing appears on it during startup, until the windows login screen. I'm pretty sure its not a bios option either. When I looked through Dell, they do have a bios update for Nvidea, but when I tried to install it it said i am already up to date. So I'm not really quite sure what to do. Thank you, any help is appreciated.....even if I'm in the wrong place, please point me in the right direction. Thank you!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Posted February 11, 2009 Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 Have you tried hitting the fn key combination to switch monitors in the BIOS? You really shouldn't be installing graphics card drivers with the external monitor attached anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest zzeekop Posted February 11, 2009 Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 I think I have exactly the same probleme with my hp dv9545 (NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS) no BIOS during startup on laptop screen (however it does show on the external monitor) also (sometimes, not always) the logon screen is shown on the laptop but other times it just shows up on the external monitor I can get the laptop screen to work by closing and opening the lid (but this doesn't seem to work when powercord isn't plugged in) hope someone knows the solution to our problemes. tnx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Halfstep Posted February 11, 2009 Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 I did try to click the fn-f8 key which switches monitors. That didn't do anything. And as to why I installed a graphics card driver with an attached monitor, the laptop monitor was completely blank and was showing nothing, so I didn't really have a choice. I think the main problem here is a driver issue. I think that whatever drivers dell is providing don't work properly for my particular model. There were two components to the driver install from their support website. The first was the normal nvidia driver which obviously killed my computer. Installing the driver provided by your site fixed that. The second component of the problem is the dell bios update. There were 2 bios updates made. I'm not really sure how this works because I don't know a lot about laptops, but one of the bios updates was specifically for the video card. So my guess is that for some reason the bios cannot access the driver to use the monitor. I may be completely wrong, but thats my best guess. How does the bios find a monitor? Does it have a set of drivers? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Posted February 11, 2009 Report Share Posted February 11, 2009 What laptop and graphics card do you have? Updating the GPU's VBIOS on some Dell models can break the graphics card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Halfstep Posted February 12, 2009 Report Share Posted February 12, 2009 I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 My graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce 4 4200. Ya I wish I had known that before hand. Is there anything I can do to fix it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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