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N5110 65w vs 90w, Weird Screens Crash
Please Help
I bought a dell N5110 i5 4 GB 500 GB about three years ago from the dell outlet. Initially there was a problem where the screen would go all "funny" hard to describe (see below for a picture). Spoke to Dell Support and it never got resolved, engineer came out, switched motherboard problem continued. Since I got the machine pretty cheap and it only happened once a week I put up with it.
As time went on it stopped happening. Then last week my HDD failed and I replaced it with a SSD. Also bought a new charger as the old one had broken some time before, and I had been using an old 65w one.
Had to reinstall the drivers & windows then the problem came back with vengeance, crashing once an hour. Running video seems to trigger it, but it can go any time.
- Ran full and thorough checks from bios menu - All Passed
- Ran the Dell Windows diagnostic checks - All Passed
- All Windows updates updated.
- Read about N5110s over heating so installed a logger of the temperatures, doesn't appear to be this as it crashes at as low as 65c but during the graphic card stress was as high as 85c.
- Initially I thought it was a driver issue, installed all the drivers from the Dell. Thinking that maybe a driver update had fixed it. Still happening.
- In power management turned the CPU and GPU down to 90% max. Still happening.
Then I realised that at the same time as fixing the HDD I'd replaced the Charger, previously when booting using the 65w it came up with a warning saying that at 65w the performance will be adjusted to cope (or something like that). When my dell charger arrived I threw out the 65W. Obviously
So I think whatever the bios is switching off on the "reduced performance" is what is causing the crash.
This is really frustrating because I was flipping a coin to decide to buy a new laptop or fix this one up. I decide to fix this one and then this comes back.
So my question; has anyone else seen this and what settings does a 65W change. I’m thinking of buying a 65w charger just to test my theory. With my current run of luck on this, probably just be wasting another £30.
Help Please,
Rob