Dell Vista Graphics Driver Problem

JimboJangles

JimboJangles

New Member
My girlfriend bought a new Dell Inspiron 1501 about a month ago, and it came with Vista. The graphics driver has been failing, and the computer has been getting blue lines flickering across the screen. Usually restarting works as a temporary fix, but it keeps happening again.
Reinstalling the driver provided by support.dell.com and reinstalling the OS don't fix the problem... nor does some Vista update I was told would solve the issue...
any suggestions or ideas? I'd really like to avoid installing XP...
 
did it start with xp. if not would you mind maybe trying it and seeing if it works. you can go back i just want to see if there is a difference. if you dont want to try we can help you elseway
 
no, she just bought it recently so it came with Vista.
can I install XP without harming the current installation of Vista? Because I really don't want to mess with backing up her files again... and when I reinstalled vista, I got rid of the 2nd partition with recovery files or whatever so she would have extra space... so no 2nd partition to install XP on.
 
ok. i would try this. get a small distro of linux live. so something that can be loaded onto the memory and not need to be loaded to the hard drive. boot from that and see if the lines are there
 
Okay, I'll give it a try with BartPE.
I don't have her computer here, so I'll have to wait til tomorrow to do it =/
By the way, the lines don't always show up... sometimes it'll last 30 minutes before they show up, sometimes hours, but most often when resuming from hibernation.
 
ever tried uninstall the driver and just let window vista download it for you? i had problem with 8800gts 320 on my vista ultimate 64bit but after letting vista download the driver itself. it is ACTually better than the driver you can download from Nvidia.
 
junwang0808 said:
ever tried uninstall the driver and just let window vista download it for you? i had problem with 8800gts 320 on my vista ultimate 64bit but after letting vista download the driver itself. it is ACTually better than the driver you can download from Nvidia.
Click to expand...

I thought that Vista drivers suck?
 
I'll give that a try. But won't uninstalling the video driver make the screen go all crazy again? It wouldn't be too easy to get vista to download the driver when I can't see anything... I could always reinstall the original driver if that happened though.

I tried booting from a live ubuntu disc I have, and it seemed to run just fine for about half an hour with no graphics problems... ubuntu's actually pretty sweet, I hadn't used my disc yet.

So should I look at what brand of video card she has? For example, my D610 has an ATI Mobility Radeon X300, so should I just go to the ati website and find a driver for that graphics card? (even though their website doesn't say it supports dells) I would think that the driver supplied by dell would be the most up-to-date...
 
well, i use to have brightness problems with Nvidia driver but after trying the vista driver. everything is fine although, it doesn't completely support DX10 but it is all good i don't use it that much anyways.

NoteL vista doesn't have its own graphic driver. it automatically indentify your card and find it and download it for you online all automatically no need worry


it doesn't make the screen all crazy it just makes everything look uglier no biggie!
 
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Uh oh, just kidding... It definitely froze up and went to a gray-striped screen after I had uninstalled the ATI thing... I did it from add-remove programs, but the ATI uninstall menu included the driver as an option...
 
Whatever comes with the Dell Inspiron 1501... onboard I suppose. I really don't know a whole lot about graphics cards and such...
 
that is so weard. so it runs fine on a boot disk but it hates windows. how long did you test it for?
 
it ran on the boot disc for like 30 minutes... but the thing with what's going wrong is, it's completely unpredictable. Sometimes it will do it right after you start up, and sometimes it will wait hours and hours before acting up again.
I'm thinking it might be a software problem with the copy of vista that came with her laptop? We reinstalled it recently and that didn't fix the problem.
I'm thinking about just backing up her files and installing vista ultimate and then XP, and hopefully one will actually work.
 
does anyone know where i could find another video driver for the Inspiron 1501? It's an ATI driver, and the one on their site screws up less often than the driver on dell's support site, but i'd like to find something that just works...
 
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