Hallo

You are not the first one to have problems with this black screen, when having power supply dis engaged.

I am pritty sure this is a easy fix, because i sa a thread which was solved, and he/she had the same problem as you,, just search "black screen" or something like that in the search box and you will probably find the thread (:

Can I plz ask you: I have the same graphic card (8700 GT) and laptop (XPS M1730) as you, but i have problems with lags in game :specially with the old dell driver (156.02) .. have you experienced any such problems with your XPS??

Hope that you will answer my quistion, and your problems can be solved.

Best regards nick

I have the same problems :emotion-6:

My configuration: XPS 1730, Geforce 8700M GT, Nvidia drivers for notebooks 179.28 - Win Vista 32-bit

I assume you tried the newest Dell drivers (176.78) released Dec 21 as I did ??

yes :emotion-6:

Hi,

I too have the XPS M1730 with the nVidia GeForce GO 8700M GT SLI video card and Vista Home edition installed.  I have this problem as well.  If there is a fix/workaround that has been defined and anybody can find it please link it here.

After a bit more trolling I found something that worked for my computer.

1. Click the Start and type "System Configuration" (without the quotes) into the Start Search box.
2. Click Continue on the User Account Control Dialog.
3. Click the Boot Tab.
4. Check the box next to "No GUI Boot."
5. Click OK and Reboot.

Hope this helps.

Interesting ....has this worked for you for several boots while on battery ? The reason I ask is found in this thread :http://en.community.dell.com/forums/thread/19255335.aspx

where the last post says (referring to the No GUI Boot solution) :

 "Well, I spoke too soon. It works on first (on battery) boot but not on subsquent boots"

I have not had the blank screen at boot or if I did, I just chalked it up to the driver I downloaded from the NVidia site.  I have tried several drivers from NVidia and most recently the latest one posted to the web by Dell.  ALL of the newer drivers result in extremely POOR performance in game.  I have returned to the original driver each time.  Frame rates in populated zones on old driver are ~45 FPS, but the new driver with exact same game settings drops to low 20's and even down to 8 FPS.

For a system with dual SLI graphics, this is just wrong.  I can't even use SLI with Vista (the factory installed OS) without stability or performance issues due to the way Vista is written.  So the extra 8700 was a waste of money.

While I love the way my World of Warcraft edtion XPS M1730 looks and its features, I'm quite dissapointed that with dual 8700's it performs so poorly as a gaming system.

I have configured it to dual-boot to Ubuntu and get 120 FPS on WoW with Cedega (have not tried Cedega 7) but can't get Ventrilo to work properly.  Otherwise, I'd wipe Vista without looking back.

Bottom Line, Dell AND NVidia:  Make sure the drivers not only "work" but at least meet the performance of the previous drivers or explain why performance had to be sacrificed for stability.  Get with Microsoft to figure out how to get SLI to work in Vista!

Old Driver:

Title      : Video:nVidia Siberia G84 SLI Driver

Version    : A03

OEM Name   : nVidia

OEM Ver    : 156.61

Computers  : XPS:M1730

OS         : Windows Vista 32-bit

New Driver:

Version:    176.78 V32, A09

I decided to try the "No GUI" boot option with the newest Dell drivers (176.78) and the problem remains the same... no visible display when on battery ...everything is fine when using the power adaptor. 

Interesting, it worked for me.

Does anybody know about any new fix ?

That depends on what you've already tried :emotion-55:

But assuming you're tried everything discussed/suggested above, then no :emotion-6:

Excellent news !

Thanks for advising,

Jeremy

Did they ever get back to you... the fix??