Over the last week, I have been having some problems with my Dell E1705. It has 2gb of ram, 60gb HDD, and an Nvidia Geforce Go 7900GS. Last weekend, while playing WoW, I had the screen throw some artifacts in the form of grey lines emitting from the center of the screen. The laptop completely locked up, and I had to manually turn it off by holding down the power button. After turning it back on, it booted fine with no issues. I began to play WoW again, and within a few minutes, the screen just went black. This time, the laptop did not lock up. I could still hear all of the sounds going in the background as normal. Manually shut the laptop down again, and after restarting, all I got was a blank screen. The LCD backlight came on, but that was it.
Knowing my warranty has expired, I unplugged the laptop, yanked the battery, and began disassembly to see if I cound find anything visually wrong. COuldnt find anything, so put it all back together. Tried booting the laptop again, and it started up fine with no issues. I decided that maybe it was a video driver issue, so went to Nvidia's website to find that they did have an updated driver for my video card. Installed the new driver, and the laptop ran flawlessly for several days.
Flash ahead to alst night. I was at home after using my laptop all day at work. Was playing WoW, and about 30 minutes into my playtime, the laptop locked up. It had some strange repeating colored dots across the screen ontop of the WoW screen. I powered it down, and upon turning it abck on, I got a black screen. After a bit of research on the web, I plugged an external monitor into it, and booted it up. I was able to see everything on the external monitor, but it had random apostrophes placed everywhere while in DOS. Windows Vista wont fully boot either.
I have a feeling the GPU is shot, but am worried aobut it being a mobo issue as well. The dell diagnostics test throws an error saying "Incompatible Video Device". What are the odds of me being able to buy a new video card and fix my laptop? Is this a common issue with the 7900GS? Is there a recall of sorts for the video card?
Knowing my warranty has expired, I unplugged the laptop, yanked the battery, and began disassembly to see if I cound find anything visually wrong. COuldnt find anything, so put it all back together. Tried booting the laptop again, and it started up fine with no issues. I decided that maybe it was a video driver issue, so went to Nvidia's website to find that they did have an updated driver for my video card. Installed the new driver, and the laptop ran flawlessly for several days.
Flash ahead to alst night. I was at home after using my laptop all day at work. Was playing WoW, and about 30 minutes into my playtime, the laptop locked up. It had some strange repeating colored dots across the screen ontop of the WoW screen. I powered it down, and upon turning it abck on, I got a black screen. After a bit of research on the web, I plugged an external monitor into it, and booted it up. I was able to see everything on the external monitor, but it had random apostrophes placed everywhere while in DOS. Windows Vista wont fully boot either.
I have a feeling the GPU is shot, but am worried aobut it being a mobo issue as well. The dell diagnostics test throws an error saying "Incompatible Video Device". What are the odds of me being able to buy a new video card and fix my laptop? Is this a common issue with the 7900GS? Is there a recall of sorts for the video card?
