Dell Inspiron 9300 graphic problem?

I'm not really sure what the problem is, so Ill try to describe what happens.

I've had my 9300 for alittle over a year no problems, never had any regrest for buying it. I use my 9300 for mostly gaming WoW, half-life, ect. Then 3 days ago something strange happened. I was playing WoW when the screen got all these little wavey lines on it, not connected but all over the screen. Then everything froze up and I had to Manually turn it of(hold the power button). When I loaded it back up it said that my graphic card had caused an serious error and to check my drivers to make sure they were up todate. I came to the dell site after searching around alittle and got the most recent geforce 6800 driver I could find. Restarted computer and Opened WoW. No problems, infact it ran much smoother than it has been for awhile. Then after about 3 minutes the same thing happend, little lines, kinda distored streched out images and then it froze up. It has been doing that ever since.
I've gone to the dell site and downloaded just about every most recent option they have listed for downloads for 9300s. It still does it sometimes it will take an hour and sometimes 1 minute, but i still get the wavy little lines everywhere and then it freezes up. I've even tried system restores to a week or two before it first happend. If you think a picture would help next time it happens ill see if i can take a picture and upload it somewhere.

Any ideas on what could be wrong would be greatly appreciated.

 

sounds like overheating, what are your gpu temps? Have you ever opend up your notebook to evict the the dust bunnies? If you havent I highly suggest you do, dust build up on the heat sink and fans restrict the air flow, and eventually cause overheating, you could try blowing compressed air into the vents, but if dust is your problem, its probably built up way too much for that to have any effect, good luck

 

double post

 

I think the last time I checked it was running around 81F .. not sure what it was while playing a game, that could be it though. IT did shutdown because it overheated once. I'll have to Give it a try I suppose. Any specific areas I should clean out. Or everything I can find to Open, I should clean out.
I didn't know that overheating could do that. 0_o
Thanks
ill let you know if it worked or not.

 

the best route would be to take it completely apart, thats the only way you can get to video card HS/fan, its a fairly simple procedure, your card isnt borked, as it works for a time, then craps out, you could try using a program like I8kfangui to force the fans at high and see if that helps, though if they are choked with dust, it wont really help

 

I opened it up and cleaned it all out and that made it run around 60 degress even while playing the games but I still have the same problem. The graphics all mess up, same weird lines, sometimes the images in the games are different colors or i can see through walls, or some lines are stretched way out, then it will freeze up and I have to restart. Im sure that the dust was part of it, but now I don't know what to do next.

 

Ok it just happend again, but this time it gave me alittle something to go off of(hasn't ever gone to a blue screen, this time it did) said that file nv4_DISP caused an endless loop. So im guessing something is still wrong with my Video driver :/

 

possibly, completely remove the old drivers and go with the latest dell driver and see if that fixes it, if it does, you can try whatever performance driver you want, does this happen in all 3d apps? or just WOW, is that 60c orF, you were saying earlier it was 80f, wich is remarkably cool, 60f, especially while gaming would be near impossible, even in a freezer, what are you using to measure your temps?

 

mostly during WoW and halflife.. but sometimes when it happens and i restart it will happen as soon as windows loads and i ahve to restarta gain, which then makes it go away for awhile. and yeah i ment 80c and 60c not 60f ...

and how would i delete all my video drivers, want to make sure i don't delete something i shouldn't. would i just go to explore.. then the drivers folder then open up the video drivers and delete them?

 

if you were hitting 81c for light load tasks, your in trouble,thats 178f and the card could be seriously borked,gaming temps were probably near or over boiling, my desktop 7900gt's heavily oc'd stay around 44c under light load, and barely break 70c under 3hour+ heavy gaming sessions, I'd contact dell and see what they have to say,I hope you still have warranty, you said 81f earlier, wich is incredibly cool,27c but in a cold environment with no stress could be possible, and led me to believe your card hadnt melted, 81c under light load non gaming, your probably toast, sorry man, and good luck

 

So even though it still works for alittle while, its likely its fried.. hmm well I guess ill have to get in touch with dell and see what i can do. Thanks for your help.

Saddly im not sure if im still under warrentee, i remember when i got it i wasn't sure how long id be using it tbh. i got the 1 year warrentee, i think they called me 2 months ago and said they were going to send me some info on renewing my warnentee but i never got anything. so i dunno..

thanks again.

 

This is also happening to me.

It actually happened me to when I first got my computer.

But, ever since I started using Linux, I don't have this problem.

I also play World of Warcraft.

I recently got two hard drives one with Linux and the other with Windows XP.

I have not seen it happen again until I used Windows.

Today, it happened. I left my laptop (in my laptop bag) inside the trunk of my car. I live where it is cold.

We'll it happened several times when loading WoW. I was pissed.

I am thinking it is temperature though. Because that is the first time it happened 3-4 times in a row when starting wow.

Although, I do not have a solution....I have a quick way to recover from it (without rebooting). Use your FN-ESC (StandBy) button. It puts the computer to sleep.

After it falls asleep, hit the power button and you are back in Windows and to the races.

I'm glad I'm not the only one with this problem.

Cheers

- MaestroTech

 

Extreme cold can cause problems with computer chips as well as heat, intel actually has specially designed chips to work in arctic environments. I remember when the desktop 7900's first came out, some of the hardcore hardware geeks were having problems with them in thir super cooled rigs, if the video chip was about 45c or below, it would force itself to minimum clock speeds,

another note, cold temps, especially around the freezing point are Extremely bad for lcds, if its ever been left in the cold for awhile, DO NOT turn it on until its slowly come back to a stable room tempreture,(at least an hour in a comfortably warm room) unless you think cracked screens are artistic. The bottom of dells lcds get very warm very quickly, if the top half of your screen is extremely cold, the rapid heating of the bottom half will cause it to expand too quickly and results in a cracked screen

 

Wow....that's is VERY good to know.

Thank you Iceman....(hmm, appropriate name for this thread )

Out of curiousity, have you had experience with this bad thing?