Lots of stuff, screen crashes, drivers et al

[Guest BravoGolf]

Hi guys,

My sincere apologies to you all for what is probably perceived as technical incompetence or something. I'm really quite stuck as to what to do here.

Basically, I shall start from the beginning (you might want to get your tea/coffee now :) ). I have an Inspiron 8500 laptop with an nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go (Dell Mobile) graphics card. I have three partitions on my laptop (System C and the other two for apps and install files).

Over a period of about 4 months my laptop would only sporadically fail to boot up, well it would boot up but when it fully loaded loads of lines and stuff would appear on the screen.

Eventually this lead to the blue screen of death everytime I attempted to boot up. Anyways, I knew the graphics card was the result of all of the above as it would boot up fine when in Safe mode.

So, since DnR'ing drivers would not work (I think I made a mistake or two during it), I decided to completely format the system drive and reinstall XP SP2. I downloaded the drivers from the Dell website for the graphics card.

Now, when I change resolution or attempt to load any App that requires a change in resolution, the screen goes a pasty white with a soft lens flare effect in the centre. The white part then ends up taking over the entire screen. If I hit ALT F4, it returns to desktop fine. Though the laptop boots up fine now.

So summarise, I have two questions:

1 - What do I do?

2 - Since I format the laptop, do I need other display drivers like, I dunno, the TFT screen itself or something?

I would genuinely appreciate any help at all. Happy new year btw :)

[Bill]

I am not sure about what you should do, but you should not need any drivers for your screen, what kind of screen do you have?

I have an Ultrasharp and did a fresh install on a brand new Hard Disk drive about 2 months ago and did not need any special Dell drivers for my screen. (needed them for sound, network adapter, touchpad, and some other stuff, although you can use drivers other than from Dell for most stuff anyway)

You should wait for some other Dell owners with the 4200 go to tell you what driver to try, but the 71.24 with Pieter's mod INF should work nice, I have not tried that yet but I think it is a good driver to try.

Hope that helps.

Bill

[LSudlow]

Also, go to Dell's site and download EVERYTHING for your machine. You probably need the Dell chipset driver, a System driver, and a few other things that aren't included in Windows (sound driver, network driver, etc.).

Once you've done that, reinstall the Dell video driver for your machine. If it still fails, I'd start looking for a hardware problem. If it works, then we'll figure out how to get our drivers working on your machine. But go install those other Dell drivers first.

Good luck!

[Guest BravoGolf]

Hi guys, thanks for your help.

I've currently got drivers for pretty much everything else installed on the system. I'll reinstall the graphics card drivers again tonight (I assume I just reinstall?).

I expect it to be the same after the reinstall though, as they're the same drivers. O would be very interested in you guys reccomending me a driver though :)

[LSudlow]

Instead of just installing, try uninstalling the current driver in the Control Panel, under "Add/Remove Programs" first. That will remove everything and let you start with a clean driver.

Good luck!

[Guest BravoGolf]

Thanks very much!

I removed the drivers via the control panel as per all your advice and reinstalled the drivers via Device Manager (using the "have disk" method). That seems to have done the trick, changes resolution and stuff without crashing (and computer still boots up ok).

Cheers, I'll buy you a pint of Guinness sometime :)

Wonder if I shall try and install one of those modded INF files :)

[LSudlow]

The modded infs should work. If not, you can always uninstall them (like you just did) and reinstall your current driver.

I'm glad it's working!

:)