Inspiron 8100 - ATI Radeon 7500 (64mb) - Screen distorted (flicker)

@Peter_Snoek:

I don´t experience any problems at the moment. I am a little afraid that they send it back defective, because that time the techie started it all was fine... That would cost me time and money.




My Inspiron is built in 2001.




Regards, martin

Hi,



i had a interesting phone call with one of the dell technicians and he had a solution that worked for me:



Step 0: Switch it off, Remove battery, unplug A/C Current, press and hold power button...



Step 1: Open the plastic cover where the power button is located



Step 2: Pull the white plastic lid (the display connector) off the board



Step 3: look at it and remove any dirt, look if the connector cable looks good.



Step 4: Push the connector back onto the board, undo Step 1 ;-) and be happy...




Here are some photos i took from my distorted Screen and one without backlight:















so long,
martin


Specs: I8100, GF2Go, 512Mb, 1GHz, DVD/CD-R/W, 1600x1200 TFT, yellow wrist-pads...

Hi everybody - I seem to have joined a popular club. My 8100 has been suffering from the dreaded screen distortion for some weeks. It disappears on reboot and does not come back until the next boot - it appears on an external monitor and the concensus seems to be that it is the video card. Meanwhile, getting support is the main problem. Watch this space

Hi Peter,

as this problem began to arise, i also thought it might be the settings and i started to play around... But when i think of this now i remember that everytime the distortion went away i had done sth. with the settings and then moved the lid because i wanted to see... test your solution by moving (not closing, just stretch to maximum opening) the lid, if it comes back again, try re-plugging the cable.

While doing research here and reading, i think there are two kinds of Problems: One is the Plug and cable like me (which is c*%p anyway), the other is a real hardware problem with the graphics adapter, that could indeed be solved by some settings.

The technician told me what it will cost if the plug dies forever: the whole LCD will be replaced and you will pay 650 EUR for that! Just because of a .50 Cent part, but that can be considered "usual business" nowadays.



good luck, martin

ps: somehow the reported memory for my radeon 7500 has decreased from 64 to 32...

(at least that's what windows reports to me on the display settings, "settings" tab, "advanced button", "adapter" tab.)

Hi guys,

Indeed a popular club here... Some more info ( cause keeping each other informed is the only support thats available... Dell keeps their mouth shut about this one... )

I have a workaround too.  Open display properties, go to tab 'settings' (instellingen, in my dutch winxp), click advanced (geavanceerd), go to tab 'problems' (don't know what name it's in english, mine reads 'problemen oplossen', and is has the slider 'hardware acceleration'.  Set the slider fully to the left (to disable all hardware acceleration) and also disable the 'combined read/write' checkbox.  As long as I DONT CLOSE THE LID the screen stays normal (for > 8 hours now).  So I can't use 3d functions, and I can't close the lid to hibernate (don't know if closing the lid, or hibernating causes the distortion to come back).

I will give the "shimmer3000" a try offcourse!

kind regards,
Peter

Hi Peter,

i think you have Problem two (the one with the defective graphics card). Maybe it jumped out of its connector while you jumped around with your laptop...

Good Luck,

martin

Well i have tried lowering the acceleration and cleaning the conection to the screen and both the screen and the external monitor keeps flickering, any ideas?

Thanks

Hi SoUr,

well, if both monitors still flicker, i think it will be the graphics board. Return the lappy to dell, they should repair it...

regards,
martin

When I boot up the laptop the video card loads with 64M of RAM, and I have this very same video problem.

If I remove the ATI program using the control pannel, do not re-boot when asked, then uninstall the driver, using display properties, settings, advanced, adapter, properties, driver, unistall and re-boot.

Cancel windows install new hardware wizard and let the computer load the native driver, then re-install the ATI driver the laptop re-boots with 32M of RAM instead of 64M of RAM and works find, no screen problem, until shut off.

I ran the Dell Diagnostic program and it gave me the following error message:

Test Errors
VESA SVGA Video - Video Memory Test     : Fail
Result Code: 5300-0119
Msg: Detected a failure while writing and reading video memory.  Video mode:
4h (320x200x4).  Address B8020h, expected to read 0h, but read 6200420h instead.

The Dell forum has a number of threads discussing this video card problem it seems that a growing number of people are having this same problem!

I paid $2500 for this Inspiron 8100 in February 2002, I had to have the display screen replaced 9 months later because of the “watermark” , now, just one and one half years later, the video card is bad!

I think that Dell should send replacements for these faulty cards! Period!

 

Message Edited by Summars on 11-05-2003 01:42 AM

Quadro 4 700 works on 8100!