Disapearing cursor over a horizontal line on display

yeh, I guess I never noticed till now but after closing the screen the line does come back.. grr

I wonder why I never noticed when I tried last time, when I read your post in that other thread.

Greetings from Greece,

I have the same problem with my I8500 after upgrading to Bios A03.I do not only have the disapearing cursor problem but i have noticed also 2 other things.

1. There is a black screen taking some orange and green colors for about 2 seconds between bios checkup and windows startup everytime i shut on my computer.
2. Immediately after windows xp startup has been concluded, the screen goes off and then on for 1 and maybe less second.

Does anybody else experiences the same problems?

The msconfig trick did not work for me.I will also try the I8600 drivers and the Modified Detonator INF's to see what will happen.Honestly i do not expect much.Only the A02 or A04 Bios will do the trick.

I am tired with I8500.First the noisy adapter,then the flimpsy keyboard.The previous I8200 that i had was much better....

It is definitely the A03 video BIOS update. As soon as I installed it, line in the middle of the screen where the curser disappears. Another symtom is that a couple of the 3D apps I use will not run, they either horribly crash and cause the system to restart itself, OR it causes a device failure and the driver for the card totally quits. It is a sad site to see your brand new laptop running 16 color at 640X480 when this happens. Restarting is required to get it going again.

Dell support has been terrible on this issue. Since they now know about it, why haven't they taken the BIOS update off the support web page? Why do they not offer an A02 BIOS flasher so we can go back to what works? Why do their support staff tell you to do crazy stuff like uninstall drivers and do system restores when that has nothing to do with the BIOS?

I am now going to try the 8600 drivers everybody is recommending, and hopefully that works. One of those 3D apps is the software our company develops, so my work has come to a stand still over the last few days. When is Dell going to give us rebates on all the time=money it has cost us due to troubleshooting the problems they create. How about a little testing before you release software Dell?

It must be a Dell!

Can you try to disable NVidia driver helper service and remove NvCpl and NvWiz from registry run key

You can launch msconfig, go to its startup page uncheck them, than go to services tab and uncheck Nvidia driver helper. Restart and see if this helps.

Hi,

thanks to the posts in this forum I got the i8600 nvidia driver downloaded and installed. the cursor problem disapeared. the cursor problem started after having downloaded the A03 BIOS flash upgrade.

DELL should really act and take off the BIOS A03 and provide the i8600 nvidia driver on the i8500 driver section.

thanks again for the hint.

 

 

 

Andrew

Your fix worked!!  And, I have the hardware acceleration, under the Advanced button, Troubleshoot Tab, set to Full.  I even opened and closed the lid of the 8500 a couple of times and restarted.

No disappearing cursor!!

Thanks.

Too bad Dell can't hire people like Andrew instead of farming out their tech support to incompetent people in India, Malaysia, and the Phillipines.

Hi,
unfortunately I did not see these posts until after I flashed my nVidia Bios and posted a new thread myself. I am positive that the problem occurs with the new bios but might not be in the bios itself. I suspect that the older driver is somewhat not compatible the the new bios and that is why someone has reported the card to work properly with the new drivers available for the i8600 or with the generic drivers. My best guess is that the new drivers will be compatible with the new bios. In the meantime, if anyone found an older version of the bios, can you please tell us how did you find it and if it worked?

By the way, too bad that tech support is NOT aware of this and made me wipe my hard drive even though I was telling them the problem was with the bios and therefore could not be fixed by formatting the hard drive. But I guess tech support has to go through standard steps and can't help you if the problem is not "standard."
Thank you

TechDog,

Andrew's solution is only temporary. Disabling all the nVidia apps from starting up disables some advanced features of the video card. I wouldn't reccomend this to anyone unless they expressly need to do it.

I agree with ReWeN on this.  There is something REALLY fishy going on in this latest BIOS revision internally.  The only way to get rid of the disappearing cursor is to disable advanced features and full hadrware acceleration.  This is unacceptable.  Even when doing so I have found serious bugs within the OpenGL functionality of the card, although at first glance things may appear fine because your cursor is fixed, there are still issues behind the scenes functionally.  There needs to be a way to revert back to the old bios.  I have called tech support numerous times with no solutions and not much help.  Maybe we will see an A04 revision for the graphics card soon, now that the System A04 BIOS has been released.

I must  agree with ReWen and method404 on this issue.

Disabling all the nVidia apps from starting up disables some advanced features of the video card.This is not the solution we all need.

Furthermore, the problem with the screen taking strange colors before startup and then goes blank for a few seconds after I log on to Windows will not be solved by using the msconfig trick.Now i use 45.23 driver with Terapy's modified infs ( http://www.geocities.com/madtoast/ ) which makes the cursor problem disappears but i am waiting for the Bios update in order to solve the other 2 problems as well.

I also tried 42.58 driver and 44.82 from Dell and 44.03 driver with Terapy's modified infs.

Using 3DMark03 v3.3.0 Pro with default options (Game 1,2,3 selected-1024x768...) i scored:

• 1034 on 42.58 (Dell)
• 1095 on 44.03 (Terapy's)
• 1091 on 44.82 (Dell)
• 1110 on 45.23 (Terapy's)

Someone else?

 Greetings from Greece to ALL!!!  

           My 8500 Inspiron

-Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 processor-M at 2.0GHz
-15.4 inch Wide-Aspect Super TFT Active Matrix display WSXGA+
-512MB DDR RAM 266Mhz
-40GB 5400 RPM Ultra ATA Hard Drive
-nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go 64MB DDR
-24x CD-RW / 8x DVD-ROM Combo Drive
-Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition

Good news!

At least for me, installing the Inspiron 8600 nVidia driver on the Inspiron 8500 solved (apparently) all the problems. I don't use Open GL though, so I have no idea if these problems will persist.

I would like to make a few comments:

1) If the driver for the Inspiron 8600 is the solution for the Inspiron 8500 with the new bios, the driver should be on the i8500 page as well. I also noticed that the when you unzip the driver it DOES say it is also for the i8500 (they do have very similar hardware anyway).

2) Tech support should be aware of the problems/solutions that appear on the forum, at least they would stop suggesting to format hard drives to solve Bios problems (!). Since the moderator on the forum was aware of the other driver I don't see why tech support should not.

3) Someone should make sure/test that the drivers and updates on the download page actually work with the respective pc's.

I hope to hear that this big mess is over

Yeah, just wanted to report that although the 8600 drivers fixed the problems most of the time, occasionally it will still startup with the disappearing curser, or after leaving the computer run for awhile I sometimes come back and it's there again. And I am still having very strange openGL behavior in a few 3D apps, not fun! How hard can it be to give us the A02 BIOS?  You know someone at Dell has a copy of it!

*

After several reboots i still using 45.23 drivers with no cursor problem.Any news from you?

            My 8500 Inspiron

-Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 processor-M at 2.0GHz
-15.4 inch Wide-Aspect Super TFT Active Matrix display WSXGA+
-512MB DDR RAM 266Mhz
-40GB 5400 RPM Ultra ATA Hard Drive
-nVidia GeForce4 4200 Go 64MB DDR
-24x CD-RW / 8x DVD-ROM Combo Drive
-Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition