This laptop is about 6 months out of warranty.  This problem began without warning the other day.  When starting up, the display works fine until loading the GUI.  The Windows XP splash screen that is normally displayed during startup disappears as usual, but instead of being immediately replaced with the GUI that displays pre-logon status messages like "Preparing network connections" and "Applying Computer Settings", the screen remains black.  I can log onto windows blindly because I know the keystrokes, but no matter what I do, the screen remains black.  If I log in using Safe Mode or VGA Mode, the screen works fine.  If I try to change the screen resolution to anything other than VGA (640 x 480) using the Radeon Driver, the screen goes black.  If I completely remove the ATI driver and start using a standard VGA driver, I can change into standard resolutions (i.e. 800x600, 1024x768, etc), but since the 8500 has a widescreen display images are distorted.  The only way for me to run this panel in it's native resolution is to get the Mobility Radeon 9000 driver working properly.

 

Since after much wrangling and testing I was unable to make any headway with this, I assumed my video card must be going flaky on me.  I purchased a replacement (identical model), popped it into place, booted up, and still have the same problem.  What I assumed to be a hardware problem is looking more and more like a software problem, but no matter what I do, I can't get the normal driver to install.  I can't even get Windows to recognize the driver as matching my hardware; when I scan for appropriate drivers and point it to the CD, or the folder containing known matching drivers, it fails to recognize that the folder contains compatible drivers.

 

Question is, is this a hardware problem or a software problem?  It's acting like a weird combination of both.  If it is indeed hardware, what, other than the system BIOS and the video card itself, could be causing this?  Since this is an LCD panel, it doesn't seem likely that if certain modes will work while others won't, it's a problem with the panel.  That's why I thought that maybe certain modes had gone bad on the video card that made it incapable of driving the monitor at those resolutions.  However, when booting from the CD and running diagnostics on the video, it passes all tests.  This makes no sense!

 

Any help appreciated. 

 

Bryan