geronimo wrote:
> First thing that happened (not long after warranty expired) is that
> the sound card died. Got around that with an external USB sound card.
> THen my grandson pulled the DVD drawer out, and I replaced it with
> upgraded DVDR/W. Maybe a month after that, Windows XP Pro stopped
> working in normal mode. The logon screen graphics would be perfect,
> but as soon as you logged on, the screen would go to jibberish and
> then completely blank out. It works in safe mode. I tried a rollback,
> but I guess that was diabled, it says that to do a rollback you must
> first log into windows in normal mode, enable the service, and then
> restart safe mode/rollback. I did start msconfig and selected to load
> only essential apps and services. NO help.
> I don't see how the NVIDIA graphics card could be bad when it has
> perfect display in safe mode. Am I right? Maybe it's one resolution
> that has crashed in normal mode, but I don't think I can get it
> changed from within safe mode. We had earlier gone to the Dell driver
> site and downloaded the latest drivers from Dell, before the display
> completely quit working in normal mode, but this did not help. Now
> today I fooled with it some more, and found that I cannot get it to
> recognize a known good flash drive The DVD drive also doesn't work,
> Explorer will show the drive and the name of the disk in it, but
> clicking SEARCH or EXPLORE does nothing. I am not sure now whether a
> DVD drive and flash drive are supposed to be functional in safe mode
> or not. Seems there is no way to recover XP if I can't load files from
> DVD or flash drive.
> I feel totally ripped of by Dell, as I paid a VERY high price for
> it, since it was quite a powerful laptop at the time, yet its dead
> within abt 2 1/2 yrs.
System Restore or rstrui.exe, is one way to return the system state
to a previous date. Depending on the size of disk space allocated for
it, you could have a month of restores on there. I understand they're
iterative, so the further back you go, the more of them that have to
be applied. If you disabled system restore, then there won't be anything
waiting for you there. One good usage for System Restore, is if you
manage to trash the Registry.
You can try a Linux LiveCD, and see if you can boot that from the
optical drive. I think it is even possible now, to use a Linux LiveCD
on another computer, and prepare a bootable flash drive. I've tried
that once here, with my 8GB flash drive. Examples of LiveCDs are
Knoppix from knopper.net and Ubuntu from ubuntu.com . My favorite
for maintenance is Knoppix 5.3.1, which is DVD sized, but it is a large
download. There are a couple remastered 5.3.1 CDs on a Japanese site -
I've booted one of those and it also seems to work fine. They manage
that, by removing some of the less useful tools. The original intention
of the DVD sized release, was to jam on as much stuff as possible. For
maintenance purposes, a much smaller software collection is sufficient.
http://www.rcis.aist.go.jp/project/knoppix/
knoppix_v5.3.1CD_20080326-20080520-AC.iso 733,239,296 bytes
knoppix_v5.3.1CD_20080326_xen3.2.1-20080519.iso 708,028,416 bytes
LiveCDs are even used for virus scanning. This one, for example,
boots, and then connects to Kaspersky and downloads virus updates.
It allows scanning a Windows disk from Linux. (The only thing this
is missing, is a web browser.) You can even do simple things
via the command prompt here. But unlike the other LiveCDs, this
one doesn't have a full set of libraries and tools. So you can't
expect to add tools to it while it is running. It is only a ~100MB
download, so significantly smaller than a usual sized LiveCD.
http://devbuilds.kaspersky-labs.com/devbuilds/RescueDisk/
Another example here (I haven't used this).
http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/
There are a couple more listed here.
http://www.askvg.com/download-free-bootable-rescue-cds-from-kaspersky...
It is quite possible to have some kind of Nvidia GPU failure,
due to their GPU packaging issues. One thing that is curious,
is a few people have tried reheating the area around the
GPU, which apparently can fix the soldering. For how long,
who knows. So there are some adventurous people who have
"fixed" their bad GPUs. They're braver than I am. I wouldn't
try that with an expensive laptop.
The Nvidia issue was handled in a pretty sleazy fashion by some
of the manufacturers. For example, some offered a "BIOS upgrade"
for the laptop, which was intended to make the cooling fan
run at a higher speed. The intention there, is to reduce the
rate of degradation of the GPU, until it is outside the warranty
period. So that the hapless buyer is screwed out of warranty
protection. Nvidia set aside $200 million for related repair
costs, so Nvidia did provide some compensation to companies
using the affected GPUs.
You could try contacting the manufacturer, and see if
there is any "extended warranty" specifically for GPU
failures. You should collect some evidence first, that
it is the GPU which has failed. (Otherwise, you may
get the "have you tried reinstalling the OS, sir" kind
of nonsense.)
See "Defective mobile video adapters" here. You should be
able to find other articles on this on the net.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia
Paul
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