Vostros Screen Not Working (Possible Inverter???)

tvercetti

I have a Dell Vostros 1710 for the past 4 years. I put a fresh install of Windows 7 a couple of weeks ago. Was playing a FPS the other nght and the screen went.

Now when I power on, a light comes on but all I have is a black screen. I connected an external monitor, it works but with vertical colour lines through the screen, I presume thats some incompatibility.

Anybody have any experience with a similar problem, I think it might possibly be something to do with the screen inverter but I haven't encountered something like this before.

holcus

Problems with inverter are easy to diagnose, just direct strong light onto a screen and looking from an angle check if you can see anything
This however seems to me like a graphics card problem especially if it is NVidia. This is fixable but not cheap

BostonB

Sounds the Nvida card problem. Well known fault with these graphics cards.

tvercetti

so presuming it is the graphics card, is it a case of buying a new card and replacing the old??

holcus

I don't think it is that easy in your case, It looks like you have nVidia 8600M (G86-770-A2) which is soldered onto the board. You need to have proper tools to do that. Second thing is that you will need to buy NEW card, not refurbished, not used. These chipsets all share common fault which makes them fail after 2-4 years from new. only cards manufactured after 2009 are known to be fault free, but... they are expensive and difficult to get

Allyall

tvercetti wrote: »

so presuming it is the graphics card, is it a case of buying a new card and replacing the old??

Or you could bring it somewhere that will reball it for under €50. (Some places may ask you to strip it down first. - i.e, remove the casing.)

holcus

Reballing is temporary solution (1-3 months) in most cases.

BostonB

There may be a version of that system with a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, onboard instead of Nvida gfx card. A better option is to replace the motherboard with that intel one, the laptop will then be reliable. It won't be able to play 3D games though.

tvercetti

Sorry to bring up this old thread again but wanted to know any places to offload this laptop. As usual the boardsies were right, the graphics card is ****ed, I contacted 2 places that google returned, no reply from 1, no interest from the other. Probably will throw it up onto Adverts. Whats a fair amount to ask for it, is it worth anything.


Dell Vostros 1710
17" Screen
3GB Ram
300 GB HDD
DVD-RW
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS Graphics Card
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.1 GHz