Help with drivers for Dell C840

[Extortioner]

Hey,

I have a Dell Latitude C840 but I am in need of new drivers because some games show with missing textures and all... I have Dell's latest driver, but it dates back to 2003. I have tried several of your drivers, installed all of them bij the inf and such, but I keep getting errors with them. My screen doubles (upper part also shows down on the screen) and I get colored lines at the right side of my screen. Only solution, reinstall Dell drivers.

Do any of you know a trick to beeing able to install newer drivers?

Thnx!

[Bill]

What games do you play?

I would try 77.77 with Pieter's mod INF, and if that is not good enough then the 82.10 driver with the Dell INF in the driver (or this modded dell INF)

Just a fair warning, quite a few newer games will not run on that card, unfortunately. You should look at getting a new laptop or a desktop card upgrade soon if you plan to play a lot of newer games.

These include Splinter Cell games (I think all of them), possibly FEAR, BF2, and a lot of games coming out this year will be DX8, 9, or 10 (VISTA) only.

Even though my card is better, and FEAR actually runs on mine, some games just won't run on my laptop either. :)

Do you have the samsung ULTRASHARP screen? (the main one that has these problems)

The enhancer page has an INF fix you can use, the Dell SEC3255 fix. (just select a driver version, it mods Pieter's mod INF automatically for you)

Otherwise in the Dell INF I posted a link too, you will need to manually add this to the INF.

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?showtopic=6686

I am using the 82.10 with a custom Dell INF and it works great, although my card is a little different than yours.

I used to use that 440go card till it busted or something, the last driver I tried on it was 77.72 (similar to 77.77) and it worked pretty good, althought the card was a lost hope by then, locking up with lines on the screen, but the driver did seem to run good otherwise, even in Doom3 for a few min.

77.77 was an official Nvidia release, and should be good on a lot of older cards, they have started droping old card support in these 8x drivers. :)

If that fix doesn't work then you should run NERD on the working Dell drivers and post the logfile so we can see what screen you have.

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?showtopic=756

Also if you want to I can recomend some good upgrades and mods for this laptop, I have put a nice slot loading DVD burner in it, a new 108 mbps wifi card which does have improved range as well (over the ancient 11mbps truemobile). Can also put 2 GB of RAM in it.

The latest C840 BIOS is the one to get, so you shouldnt' worry about cross flashing.

Kamika 007 also modded the keyboard, a second antenna, and the touch pad.

If I ever find a new mobo to fit this case could transform it into a whole new 3 spindle laptop or whatever. (think it is 3 spindle as 3 drives, my brothers IXPS GEN2 m170 only has 1 HDD and 1 DVD burner, I have 2 HDDs and a better DVD burner, hahahahah)

[salzrat]

I am 100% certain this is the Samsung screen problem. Bill's solution will work fine for you.

Michael

[johmut]

Hi,

In my case (same laptop, same video card) the 77.77 driver with Pieter's modded .inf did the trick.

No problems whatsoever, no blue screens, finally the beast in this vintage video card is again unleashed ....

Make sure to flash the A13 Dell bios as well. If you have installed the latest Dell drivers before then your video bios should also be updated to 4.17.00.55 C2 (A06)

Still no luck ? then post the NERD tool result for further analysis.

[Extortioner]

ill try some of the suggestions above tomorrow, and ill post my findings.