Weird problem on Dell XPS & WiN7

yoshytoshy

Hello ,just looking for a little advice on a problem I had this morning.

The screen on my xps1330 started tuning on and off and the resolution was changing ,also boxes were appearing on the screen aswell.
When this died off a little I noticed there was an update reboot notice on the screen ,so I reboot.

When I reload windows ,I can't load drivers ,unrecognised device. Device manager says Base device on two devices.
Windows update history says last update was for my monitor ,but monitor seems fine.

After some googling the only problem I can find with win7 and m1330 is the drivers for ricoh card reader.
Device manager doesn't list the card read as a ricoh reader ,so uninstall all card reader devices ,reboot and use these drivers instead DRIVERS
Everything seems fine now....

I hope your still with me ,sorry.

Question I have is why the monitor was going on and off and would this have anything to do with card reader problem ?
I'm not sure how the card reader suddenly gave problems ,theres no recent update history for it

Thanks.

TskTsk

yoshytoshy wrote: »

Question I have is why the monitor was going on and off and would this have anything to do with card reader problem ?

There's a well known issue with the GPU in the M1330 where the display starts giving trouble and eventually gives up the ghost entirely. Dell and Nvidia extended the warranty on the faulty part, but I'm not sure if it's still valid at this stage. How old is your XPS?

yoshytoshy

It's not the nvidia gpu ,it's the intel 965 (thank god).
I think the machine is about 2.5 years old ,hopefully the display chip is ok . This is a great little machine

Fysh

I would recommend going to the Dell Europe Support Site, selecting "Product Support > System Configuration" from the menu on the left hand side of the page, then putting in your service tag into the "Original System Configuration" page to get the full hardware details for your system.

Then go to "Drivers & Downloads > Drivers Home" and fetch all the latest drivers for your hardware, then install them following these instructions.

If you've still got the diagnostics partition installed on your system, I'd also suggest running through hardware diagnostics to see if they shed any further details on the issue you're having.

yoshytoshy

Thanks fysh ,I'll try that and see what comes up.

Just to be more informative as to what I did this morning, please note I am a plumber by profession so this is just me with an interest:(

I originally went to dell and just put in XPSM1330 as machine and for windows 7 a total of 7 updates are available. Which didn't include the driver pack that I installed myself.

I didn't put in my service tag ,because I presumed it would show all the options and not just the ones for my paticular machine.

Nothing seemed to be showing for my specific problem ,thats why I started googling for solutions and came accross someone who mentioned the ricoh drivers for the sd card reader.
Then I checked device manager and noticed my card reader was listed as a standard card reader.
Found the reader drivers as mentioned above and that has got rid of my two unkown base devices.


I had no notices in device manager after installing windows 7 ,few months ago.
So I was worried something is failing and I don't want to go buying a new machine ,if I can be prepared to fix this one.

I wasn't expecting any problems with this machine for another couple of years ,so I got a bit of a jump this morning when this happened:o

Thanks.