XPS Gen II Gaming problem...

[Spectre323]

Background:

I have a Dell Inspirion XPS Gen II to which I aquired about a year ago. I bought it as a desktop replacement and thats what it has been doing since i have gotten it.

Old Problem:

As with everyone else and there mother i used this thing to play BF2 on and there was the ever present video card drivers issue. Well after screwing around with various drivers i finally got ahold of laptopvideo2go. 77.30's series and ,for the most part, everything was satisfactory. I was still having problem on reboting, inthat when i would reboot the LCD would just turn off and i would need to wait roughly 5-10 minutes and then reattempt. using this method i would have about 99% success rate. I tired other moniters and got the same sitution. I reverted back to the newest dell drivers for it(shipping) and the same problem was still happening. I called dell and they made me run though some bulls*** hardware scan via DOS, and it pretty much told them that my issue was a driver setting and not a hardware problem. Since I have XP Pro from school and not the orginal XP home that shipped with the PC they could offer me no more tech support. They attempted to recreate my sanario but they could not do it. I put the issue to bed and let things alone, and use the 77.30's. for a while with the same issues, but I could still play my games.

Reccurance:

My buddy was playing Word of Warcraft on my laptop and he was seeing how far he could push it. I was still using the 77.30's and all of a sudden everything went blank, and that was it. I have to revert back to the orignal(drivers) ones and then, about what seemed like the same time, dell released there new XPS laptop drivers. I reformated my computer and started from scratch using them. Yet again i could not play BF2 but I I had shifted to CS Source so everything was ok. Every so often the "reboot and nothing on my screen" would happen but this was not occuaring on the same basis. Now I have shifted back to playing BF2 and i'm in even worse problems. I tried the older 77.30 and upon restart I get a white screen and i gotta wait 5-10 minutes. Once its booted up everything is fine and BF2 runs. Once I exit BF2 and try to play again, BAM nothing. If I try to restart after that, i get the same deal. I have tired numerious drivers ranged from 77.xx to some of the newer 8x.xx from XG and laptopvideo2go.

Summary:

Soo.. I guess my questions is could this be simply a hardware issue? did something get damanged along the line here and i do really need to call dell? I'm just pissed that a laptop valued at $3800 can't run a simple friggen game with out having a seziure.

Any help would be appericated

Edited March 24, 2006 by ®®®

[Fabrice Roux]

The first thing you need to keep in mind Battlefield 2 is FAR from being a rock solid piece of software... hence the gazillion patches released.

We are probably having the same video card (I have a GF6800 Go throwing pixels at a 1920x1200 screen). Be sure to use the latest drivers 84.25 with the modded INF from here.

Then do some debugging on your side... go to the overclocking tab and tone down the 3D clocks by cutting 50% off. Your framerate will have a pretty bad hit... but if you get BF2 to be stable you might have some overheating issues. Then dusting your video card radiator is probably the way to go.

[Bill]

BF2 is definitely far from being "rock solid".

Some people run the game just find, others go through countless drivers, with hardware well above the recommend spec, and it still doesn't load.

My brother is still using the Dell drivers on his IXPS Gen2 M170 with a 7800 GTX go and it ran BF2 first try just fine.

You can try new drivers and deleting game config info (somewhere in your my documents), one of those may fix it, otherwise might as well give up and return the game as EA doesn't listen to or care about its customers.

As soon as he quits playing and lets me see what driver he has, (one of the 78.xx) I'll tell you what he is running, but it probably won't be of much help.

Edit: Hes running 78.30.