First of all, my computer is an Inspiron 8500 with an Nvidia Geforce4 4200 Go, 512MB RAM, and a WUXGA Display.
My problem first started a while back. What would happen is that upon opening my computer's lid and returning from standby the resolution would be resized to 640x480 and when I went to display properties it wouldn't let me change it. I would then restart and on restart it would return to its native resolution and be fine. This happened very rarely so I mostly ignored it. After a while, when i restarted the computer would get past the windows splash screen but then would turn black and slowly fade to white (a friend who knows far more about computers said it appeared that the backlight was on full power but no signal was being sent). This bothered me so i updated the drivers from the dell site as well as the video card's bios. The problem persisted, and, to an extent got worse. Now, sometimes, on restart i wouldnt get any picture at all until maybe the screen just turned white.
At this point i emailed dell tech support which told me that i had a corrupted OS and i needed to do a repair install. Instead, i just reinstalled xp home but the problem still persisted. Another email from tech support said i needed to run a debug script on reinstall. So i debugged as per their instructions, did a low level format, and installed xp pro. By this point i had an inkling that it was a driver problem, so installed all the windows updates and drivers except for the display ones. I turned to computer off and on several times and had no problems. Then i installed newest driver from dell. On my first restart it didnt display the windows splash screen or anything. I then fully removed the drivers using driver cleaner and installed the older drivers from my dell resource cd -- same problem. Then, after reading the dell support forums i decided to try omega drivers. They worked for a while, but the problem returned and did even more strange things. For instance, the screensaver was set to be the default xp screen saver, but when it would come on I would get a strange white overlay of my screen that looked like the white backlight problem i had previously. Also, when i pressed the suspend stick, even though it was set to 'do nothing' under power settings it flooded the lcd with strange vertical lines and colors.
After reading the support forums i have tried fixing the problem by reseating the lcd connectors and taking the front plate off and makign sure the suspend stick is straight, neither fix had any effect.
Another oddity, which i have seen mentioned elsewhere but always without an explanation, is that under device manager i seem to have 3 'default displays' in addition to my 'plug and play monitor'.
Finally, plugging the computer into an external monitor causes the computer to boot normally and correctly, but on the laptop's lcd rather than the external monitor's, at least most of the time. And when it does display externally, after unplugging the external and rebooting, the computer always starts up correctly.
I know its a lot, but i think that is about it. Any help would be much appreciated.
My problem first started a while back. What would happen is that upon opening my computer's lid and returning from standby the resolution would be resized to 640x480 and when I went to display properties it wouldn't let me change it. I would then restart and on restart it would return to its native resolution and be fine. This happened very rarely so I mostly ignored it. After a while, when i restarted the computer would get past the windows splash screen but then would turn black and slowly fade to white (a friend who knows far more about computers said it appeared that the backlight was on full power but no signal was being sent). This bothered me so i updated the drivers from the dell site as well as the video card's bios. The problem persisted, and, to an extent got worse. Now, sometimes, on restart i wouldnt get any picture at all until maybe the screen just turned white.
At this point i emailed dell tech support which told me that i had a corrupted OS and i needed to do a repair install. Instead, i just reinstalled xp home but the problem still persisted. Another email from tech support said i needed to run a debug script on reinstall. So i debugged as per their instructions, did a low level format, and installed xp pro. By this point i had an inkling that it was a driver problem, so installed all the windows updates and drivers except for the display ones. I turned to computer off and on several times and had no problems. Then i installed newest driver from dell. On my first restart it didnt display the windows splash screen or anything. I then fully removed the drivers using driver cleaner and installed the older drivers from my dell resource cd -- same problem. Then, after reading the dell support forums i decided to try omega drivers. They worked for a while, but the problem returned and did even more strange things. For instance, the screensaver was set to be the default xp screen saver, but when it would come on I would get a strange white overlay of my screen that looked like the white backlight problem i had previously. Also, when i pressed the suspend stick, even though it was set to 'do nothing' under power settings it flooded the lcd with strange vertical lines and colors.
After reading the support forums i have tried fixing the problem by reseating the lcd connectors and taking the front plate off and makign sure the suspend stick is straight, neither fix had any effect.
Another oddity, which i have seen mentioned elsewhere but always without an explanation, is that under device manager i seem to have 3 'default displays' in addition to my 'plug and play monitor'.
Finally, plugging the computer into an external monitor causes the computer to boot normally and correctly, but on the laptop's lcd rather than the external monitor's, at least most of the time. And when it does display externally, after unplugging the external and rebooting, the computer always starts up correctly.
I know its a lot, but i think that is about it. Any help would be much appreciated.
