Dell 9400, 7800 gfx dead. What now ?

Quigs Snr

It seems that the 7800 go in my Dell 9400 is dead. Artefacting all over the screen and the machine is unusable. Warranty has expired of course.

What to do, can I get a cheap and cheerful card to put in it ? Where would I get one, its probably not worth spending big bucks on it at this stage I reckon, if it was going to be expensive I would be as well to buy a new machine and maybe sell off this one for scrap.

The machine always had a head problem. If you put it down on a book it would melt it. Its little rubber legs also melted off (the glue holding them melted under the intense heat from the laptop). No wonder Dell had the card clocked to half its speed (I never overclocked it by the way)

Quigs Snr

Well thanks for all your help guys !

Anyway, it was the GFX dead. I pulled it out myself and called Dell last Thursday to give them an earful (I had read that Nvidia had admitted a problem, not with the card but with how some vendors implemented it).

I was 18 months out of warranty, but when I called Dell I got through to the India Service Center, the person on the other end was very helpful, I explained what I had done to verify the fault, the troubleshooting I did etc... They pointed out that I was out of warranty, I asked was there anything they could do for me, if not could they sell me the card, any card that would fit. The agent went to the supervisor and came back 3 minutes later to tell me that if I was prepared to fit it myself Dell would as a one time goodwill gesture send me out the card on Monday. I had to have the old one ready for collection as they wanted that back, but they were true to their word, the card arrived yesterday, I installed it, it works perfectly.

The moral of the story ? I always built my own PC's but when the time came to get a laptop I went Dell because I got a great deal on the outlet. All the horror stories I have heard about Dell made me believe that I would be lucky if they even sold me the replacement card. I am really impressed with them.

ytareh

Wow!(Genuine disbelief...)

AlmightyCushion

What card did they send you out?

Quigs Snr

You could have knocked me down with a feather lads... I was always quite anti-dell, anti anyone really, but they surprised me. Maybe I just got lucky ? I bought the machine on the outlet in Feb 2006 and the warranty expired in Feb 2007 - I got a deal on the machine at the time, it was around 2200 on the web store, I got it for about 1200 on the outlet after scanning it for weeks waiting for a bargain. In Jan 2007 the power adapter packed in, but they sent me a new one the next day no questions asked, didn't even want the old one back.

It was an identical Geforce 7800 go that was sent back out (I was rather hoping for an upgrade to a 7900 but hey I'm not complaining !)

Overheal

heat problems: you want to make damn sure you mount the new one properly! Thermal paste and all that good stuff!!!

Here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=268081

That will tell you what to do to keep the machine running good.

As for Dell yeah their good about that sorta thing. After I talked to them they sent out a new laptop charger for my landlady's laptop 3 years out of warranty.