Hi All
Got my two and half year old m17x here with a problem.important Spec is:
Intel I7 2760 at 2.4Ghz per core
16gb Ram
AMD 6990M gfx card
System started by hanging alot, especially on boot up. It would take around 45 mins for the machine to be usable after boot. From that I ran the dell diagnostics launched from the spalsh screen in POST. With a "thorugh" test i got the error 2000-0123 leading me to believe it was a memory problem. Removed and reseated RAM kind of worked. I started to get graphics errors though. Some times on boot after the loading windows screen comes up i would just get a black screen indefinatly. I reboot would sometimes work. When windows did boot after a seemingly random amount of time the screen would just go mad. I tried to recreate it on paint to give you a rough idea what I mean. (See below). Basically A bit of the deaktop would be moved and replaced by another, wish I had taken some pictures now.
Tried updated graphics drivers and rolling back to older ones, neither of which helped. When I swapped via the inbuilt utility to the intel onboard gfx the problem seemed to go away and also the machine would boot alot relaibly.
To check it wasnt a software issue or virus I completely restored the machine to factory image by the alienware respawn utility. When windows tried its initial boot after this I would always just get a black screen after the alien splash screen while its POST's. I guess it was trying to use the default card (the amd6990m) to boot here? With no ability to change it to the inbuild intel one I was now screwed.
I have now removed the amd completely and rolled back to factory image which seems to be working. Before I send it off to dell who will no doupt want to charge me for fault diagnosis and a new something I would like people's thoughts on this. It defianly seems to me that the fault is with the GFX card.
Can a faulty GFX card cause the systems to hang that much?
Could a faulty card cause the earilier memory errors?
Anyone know how reasonable dell are when it comes to fixing and replacing stuff?
thanks for your time to read this :)