Monitor madness...

Ken Ibold

Ken Ibold

Final Approach
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Ken Ibold
Dell meltdown AGAIN...

My wife's Dell laptop worked fine on Sunday and shut down normally. Booting it tonight, the screen went blank at the point when the blue screen shows up and stayed blank. I shut it down with the power button and rebooted it in safe mode fine...well, safely, anyway. So I know the monitor itself works. I attached an external monitor and it boots normally and displays on the external monitor, but not on the built in screen. When I try to activate the dual monitor feature, it says the laptop screen is "not active."

I used system restore to a known good point, but it made no difference. I checked all of the display adaptor settings etc and found nothing disabled or otherwise out of whack.

Looking at the glass being half full, I had a spare monitor in the garage, the computer itself works and no data is lost. But on the other hand this is now useless as a laptop.

Any ideas? Video card issue? Driver issue?

Edit: Windows XP
 
Ken, it was a little unclear in your post what you meant by "dual monitor" feature but did you mean using >function + F8< to toggle between laptop monitor / external monitor / both? If not, try it.
 
If it is live during the BIOS splash screen, and it is live in safe mode, and if an external monitor works, the only other possibility - other than the one above (laptop screen toggled "off") - is a problem with the video driver, which is easily fixed!

Even money the function + F8 will fix it though :yes:
 
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Function + F8 does nothing. So I should uninstall the video driver and reinstall it?

I'm thinking of just backing the thing up and then throwing it into the creek behind the house. It's been a constant headache since it was new. Dell Inspiron 6000 = Yugo. In 18 months it's been through three motherboards, two hard drives and a CD drive -- and it almost never leaves her desk.
 
Ken Ibold said:
Function + F8 does nothing. So I should uninstall the video driver and reinstall it?

I'm thinking of just backing the thing up and then throwing it into the creek behind the house. It's been a constant headache since it was new. Dell Inspiron 6000 = Yugo. In 18 months it's been through three motherboards, two hard drives and a CD drive -- and it almost never leaves her desk.
Click to expand...


Ken, try this stuff:

http://support.dell.com/support/top...&component=-1&lang=-1&doclang=en&toggle=false
 
Ken Ibold said:
Function + F8 does nothing. So I should uninstall the video driver and reinstall it?

I'm thinking of just backing the thing up and then throwing it into the creek behind the house. It's been a constant headache since it was new. Dell Inspiron 6000 = Yugo. In 18 months it's been through three motherboards, two hard drives and a CD drive -- and it almost never leaves her desk.
Click to expand...
Wow, sounds like a POS.

But before you throw it in the creek, reinstall the video driver. No need to "uninstall" it first.

Go here, and enter the service tag number on the barcode sticker on the bottom of the unit.

Edit: looks like the guys above beat me to it.
 
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Ken Ibold said:
Function + F8 does nothing. So I should uninstall the video driver and reinstall it?

I'm thinking of just backing the thing up and then throwing it into the creek behind the house. It's been a constant headache since it was new. Dell Inspiron 6000 = Yugo. In 18 months it's been through three motherboards, two hard drives and a CD drive -- and it almost never leaves her desk.
Click to expand...

It sounds like you might just have a lemon from the batch - I have an Inspiron 6000 that I got in November 2005 and I'm still using it without any hardware problems and only a couple of Windows problems. In fact, I'm posting on it right now.
 
You may want to run a CHKDSK /f. It could just be filesystem corruption.

You also can try running SFC. Open a command box and type

SFC /scannow

Have the Windows disk handy. You might need it. SFC will try to identify and repair/replace missing or corrupted system files. This can take quite a long time, by the way.

Rich
 
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