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Dell Inspiron 5150 woes...


Guest N1tr0

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Greetings all.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 5150 with the fx5200 32 mb card and I'm just about to toss it in a dumpster. I'm dual booting it and every thing works great in Linux (so it's not a hardware issue), but I have to use XP for some of my apps and it keeps freezing up. I?ve seen lots of posts with the 5150?s locking up with the uxga (1200x1600), but I have the sxga+(1400x1050) so I?m not sure if this is the same problem. I?m not gaming, just surfing the web or writing a document and it just freezes. Many times it occurs when I?m minimizing or maximizing a window so that makes me believe that it?s a video driver issue. I?m using the latest bios, a37, and I?ve tried tons of different drivers. I?m currently using the 67.03 and inf and it makes no difference. I was going to flash the video card but the link to dell?s site gives a 404 and I?m not sure which one to use from this site. I grabbed the sysid.com file and it says:

NVIDIA PCI Device ID : 0324h
      Memory Straps : 0011b
Unsupported Board Type.

I?m not sure what to do at this point. I was looking at buying the ATI card from dell to see if that fixes things.

Any suggestions on what I should do?

Many thanks!

:)

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The biggest cause of freezing in the 5150 is heat (and it's a BIG problem for 5150 owners). You (we) need to blow the dust out of the cooling fins in the back of the machine every couple of weeks or so. And freezing is exactly the symptom that shows up.

Once you've ruled out heat, almost all other freezes are due to device driver problems. Does this happen with all nVidia drivers, including the original one the came with the machine? If so it's one of your other device drivers. (Or check the heat again.)

If you want to try an inf that's customized for the 5150, you can download it here. It does solve some of the 5150's problems. I recommend using it with driver version 67.03. It's an almost flawless combination on the 5150. If it still fails, I'd definitely look at some of your other drivers.

Let us know how it goes!

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Thanks so much for your reply!

I don't think its a heat issue because it doesn't happen in linux. I was running the 67.03 but I just found the 5150 inf and installed with the 71.20 and just rebooted so we'll see. If it still locks up I'll try it with the 67.03. I just found a ATI Radion for the 5150 w/32mb for 45 dollars. Is this card any better or worse than this card? Does it have the same freezing issues?

Thanks again!!!

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None of the cards should freeze, so I don't know if the problem would crop up with the ATI card or not.

I personally think the 64MB nVidia card is the best of the lot, (certainly much faster than the 32MB card), but I wouldn't blame you if you wanted to switch brands after having so much trouble!

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I had a 5150 with an ATI Mobility 9000

I had 1 major problem happen twice:

if you do not clean out your system and it overheats the ati card will burn out and cause all 3d applications and soon everything on your computer to look like a checkboard type of effect. If your under warranty you can get that replaced as many times as you want. But if your out of warranty and you burn your card by playing video games for about 5-6 months without cleaning the back of the system with some compressed air than its a headache to get it replaced.

After having this problem twice, I just asked Dell to replace my entire notebook, and I recieved a refurbished notebook with a nvidia 5200go and I am happy with it so far.

So if you go with the ati you will probably get better preformance on this particular model but if you dont clean out your system its a headache to replace.

Heres an image of what the ati card does when it overheats.

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Yep, but where is this picture that you are talking about? (To aj123)

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Yikes! Definitely scrambled!

:)

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