Inspiron 1501 video problems

I have exactly the same problem described here. It's happened pretty much since day 1. It's been several months but I do have an e-mail from Dell authorizing me to return the computer to Dell for repair when it becomes available. I travel a lot in my line of work and at the time I could not spare it for repair. It's pretty much now available to return but I may have stumbled on the fix. The Dell Tech support said they wanted to replace the motherboard but I have little confidence this would fix anything.

Over the past weekend I was riding in the car and had 3 1/2 hours to spend each way working on this issue on my own.

Specifically, my computer hangs up and the screen display changes to any of the following:

1. colored stripes
2. mostly blank screen with a 1.5 inch x 1.5 inch block somewhere.
3. On more rare occasions a blue screen with garbled grey letters.
4. dark screen.

It can happen at any time, hot or still very cool after boot up. It seems to happen more frequently just after placing a USB flash card in the machine but like I said. It can happen at any time.

When running the test for system overall score I got a 2.8 and the video is the weak link. When optimizing the system I selected better overall performance with regards to the graphics. The score only jumped to 2.9 but it has yet to hang up since.

I believe that if I were running Win XP instead of Vista Home Edition the computer would run fine as Vista puts more strain on the system video.

My system was bought in June 2007.
It is an Inspiron 1501
with a 120GB SATA HDD
and 1GB RAM.
It is running Vista Home Basic

The problems seem to exist with XP as well... I have installed XP SP2 Home on an new Inspiron 1501 (that was sold with FreeDOS) just 3 days ago. I have downloaded the latest drivers for everything from the Dell site, updated the BIOS, etc. Everything worked fine on my desk. Now my client reports that the screen become black for several occasions during the last 3 days, and that then he sometimes gets "VPU Recover has reset your graphics accelerator" message. (I know this error description is not very clear, but I didn't have chance to speak with him yet...)

From what I have seen so far in this and other Inspiron 1501 video problem related topics, it sounds like a construction mistake with this model (i.e., a problem with the hardware design), so it won't mater if you are using XP or Vista, or if you use this or that driver version, at best the frequency of crashes can be decreased. And instable hardware is just like that... sometimes it stops misbehaving, and then you believe that you have found the solution. And when you are already happy and convinced, it suddenly starts the same maddens all over again. Or, maybe with some driver or BIOS updates the chance of crashes can actually be decreased, so that the company can hope he can go away without giving your money back. But if there were true software solution, Dell would already come up with it.

Wow, here I was thinking "only me." This thing is having the same issues as everyone else, including the blue screen with just garbled "characters" (if you want to call them characters). Why is it so hard to get a working video driver on a machine you guys are selling? I updated the drivers on ATI's website; same issue. Reverted to Microsoft's native drivers and now I am actually able to use my d@mned laptop but when it goes into standby and comes back out, the screen has tons of vertical lines and flickers like crazy and I have to reboot it. Now I don't know about you, but I like the concept of saving electricity. And even though potentially 65 watts being billed at 11 cents per kWh is not exactly an arm and a leg, I would love to save some money on the electric bill without having to try to flush this thing down the toilet. Standby should work; it's 2007. Video drivers should work; it's 2007. Reloaded Vista OS like 10 times. My wife is getting frustrated here. I am spending more time with "the thing" than with her. Flashed BIOS; same issue. Called Dell like 10^9 times. Let's not even talk about that one. I could go on and on here but that would take away from my "google-time" to try to fix this issue. Wouldn't want that now would I? Thanks. P.S. My wife said hi.