Lattitude d830 video problems

Question

Hello everyone, I bought my Lattitude d830 in july 2007 and have been experiencing performance issues ever since. The specifications are 2.0ghz duo core, 2gb memory and a 256 mb quadro nvs 140m with WUXGA+ display. I decided put my laptop to the test, and what better way to that than playing a video game? Me and two friends, who happened to have the exact same laptop with the same specs, decided to have ourselves a LAN-party. We played lineage 2, a game that does not require too much of your computer to run smoothly. The game ran just fine on highest settings for the first 5-10 minutes, and then the framerate would drop to about 10. I looked at the others and they ran the game just fine. This was a depressing sight considering that i just bought a new computer, running a low requirement game. It was frustrating because the other two d830`s had no problem whatsoever. I thought to myself that it had to be some sort of driver i had forgot to install. But it wasnt, everything was as it should be, just like on the other two d830`s. I contacted Dell, and that did not help me much, as i was not able to specify what was actually wrong with the computer at the time other than poor poor POOR game performance. So i simply stopped playing video games, as i wasnt able to whatsoever. I started using my computer my computer for more productive things, and put the performance behind me. But it only got worse. Now the screen turns on black after i shut it down, forcing me to restart my computer with the power button random amount of times before the screen came back on. Sometimes it`d take 5-10 tries, other times 50-100. It also started getting way too hot, pushing 80 degrees celcius.This was when the screen flickering and random veritcal lines or lag spikes of color started.I opened up my system and saw a huge walll of dust blocking my vent, so i removed it. This helped me somewhat, as the temperature dropped, but the black screen, screen flickering and bad game performance was still there. Today i am unable to install a driver for my quadro nvs 140m (which i have been able to earlier),  without getting vertical thick lines in different colors, preventing me from seeing or doing anything with my computer. I have tried rebooting my computer many times, using everything from windows 2000 to windows 7, installing all the drivers compatible with quadro nvs 140m from dell.com, nvidia, windows update, laptopvideo2 go, but nothing solves the problem! In order for me to get the screen back to normal, i am forced to start up in safe mode and then removing the driver. I am suspecting that i am experiencing a gpu failure due to me being one of many lucky people with a faulty nvidia chip. But how can I be sure of this? Are there anyone else out there who has experienced this sort of thing on a lattitude d830, or any other system with a quadro nvs 140m video card?I am getting sick and tired of this. Any suggestions or answers would be most appreciated./Molte

tyrantula · Answer

I do not have a specific answer, and I haven't encountered your exact description of problems.

I'm posting this to find out if you have gotten to a solution.

I have the same system (D830, same display, same video card, April 2008). For a long time I had serious performance problems. The system suffered from going into a tailspin with 100% of the CPU in use for 5, 10, or 15 minutes at a time and then coming back. Also, it had very long startup times, often from 10 to 25 minutes. For a long time I used the computer with the display set to a lower than native resolution. I believe that helped somewhat. I have long suspected that it always was the video system that was at fault. That this combination of video card (and driver) and display simply wasn't ready for prime time.

In a blind search for what the problem might be, most of the hardware, including the motherboard but not including the display and video card, have been replaced. (The "blind search" was Dell's; I spent many hours on the phone with them.) All the more reason to suspect the display system (including drivers). The system did not run reasonably well until I installed Windows 7. But there continued to be intermittent problems, such as IE spinning out of control (100% CPU) and having to be closed by force. Also, with the display set to 32-bit color, video such as from Youtube was always choppy. Because of the continuing issues, I have been running the system with 16-bit color and choosing the "best performance" settings for visual effects. And the system would sometimes crash when coming back from hibernation or sleep mode if there was a Youtube clip on screen that I had paused.

A few weeks ago the Action Center part of Control Panel posted an alert saying that a new driver from Nvidia was available. I installed the driver update and found that I could finally run video with the screen set to 32-bit color without being choppy.

I'm still getting the occasional tailspin, not just with IE but with other browsers as well, and sometimes Windows Media Player goes nuts, using at least 50% of the CPU for no known reason, slowing down the system and heating it up. Overall, however, the computer is running better at this time than it has at any other time.

The video card driver I'm using now is dated February 9, 2012, version 8.17.12.9573. Again, to be sure, the card is Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M.

Locked Topics – Laptops General

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