C400 i 830M driver refuses to work under Windows 2000Pro

Hi,

Recently our Dell C400 laptops that are still running Windows 2000 Pro SP4 have started to have the following problem: Video only works on the external display while the PC is docked, but when trying to boot the computer undocked, the problem is pretty equal to "erisfreenic" reply to C400 video driver June 29th, 2004, ie:

"I cannot boot my computer into 'normal' mode. It shows the OS loading screen, but after that the screen goes black and does not respond. I can boot into safe mode, remove the driver, and it will load up perfectly in 'normal' mode."

We had two C400 with same problem earlier, but we managed to fix (after much trial and error trying to find the problem) them by downloading and installing the latest IG 830M drivers from Dell support. When this 3rd PC showed the same symptom we figured it would be a snap to fix it with the latest drivers. However, the latest driver shows this same symptom on this 3rd PC in both docked and undocked mode, basically the latest driver is useless on it. We tried downloading at least 3 versions of older drivers for W2k as well, but they even refuse to install, complaining that a RPC call failed. Yes we tried manually also removing the remains of newer versions. We also tried the manually installing the drivers using device manager and "update driver", and selecting the by Intel mentioned correct .inf file for the driver. Did not work either, the older drivers all refuse to install properly. Laptop has also been scanned a couple of times for known viruses.

Common for all C400 PCs with Win2k is that the video drivers have stopped working properly after all the latest security fixes from Microsoft have been installed, I suspect that some/one of the security fixes has broken something in the Intel Graphics 830M drivers and/or the installations program for the older versions.

As it is now the C400 in question can only be used with windows stand VGA driver using 640x480x16. A 4th C400 was actually already wiped and OS replaced with Win XP pro, this unit has worked without problem after that. It is however just a major pain to wipe a laptop and re-install it from scratch with XP and all our other business systems, just to fix the video driver. So if anybody has any good ideas and suggestions they would be very welcome.

Latest driver that we worked with is: v.6.14.10.3762, A00, we also tried 3 previous versions before it.

Best regards,

Mikael Rydstrom