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Mike Blake-Knox 2004-11-05 02:15
I have an almost 3 year old Dell Inspiron 8100 that I've been using with an external monitor (1024 x 768) to extend the desktop (internal LCD at 1600 x 1200). I had some video issues (display flickering into magenta, portions of the screen being repeated) and sent it in to Dell for repair.
It came back (for the third time!) and still isn't working the way it did before. Specifically, when I try to use the external monitor, the internal LCD will only run at 1600 x 1200 resolution when I use 16 bit colors. When I try to switch to 32 bit color, the resolution changes to 1400 x 1050 and the "inappropriate resolution for a LCD display" message is displayed. I tried using UltraMon and found that essentially the same think happened - when I had the external monitor enabled, I could only choose 8 or 16 bit color. The laptop has a Geforce 2 go video adapter with 16 MB of Video RAM which sounds adequate. Dell hasn't been of much help so I'm interested in any advice before my service warranty expires.
I've spent a lot of time fiddling with the display settings with no real results. I have noticed that the NVIDIA control on this laptop doesn't have the resolution settings functionality that I see in the dual monitor article on the ExtremeTech site. I've tried running dxdiag.exe and notice that it has problems when I use the TestDirectDraw and TestDirect3D tests. The internal LCD resolution keeps changing as the tests run and I can see the "inappropriate resolution for a LCD display"
message and that dxdiag seems to think I'm interrupting it by typing. I assume this isn't normal - if I run dxdiag on a Thinkpad A31 (ATI video), it seems to run properly.
In addition, at least one of my original video problems continues. When I choose Start/Shutdown, the dialog asking if you want to Restart/Shutdown/.. isn't displayed on a plain blue background. Instead, the background picks up parts of window title bars and repeats them down the display. I end up with an effect where I might see text from the title of a browser window repeated 20-30 times down the screen.
I'm suspicious of some kind of a video memory problem (as it might explain both symptoms) even though Dell says they've replaced the video adapter twice.
Any suggestions? Is there a diagnostic that might help? Would anyone know why Ultramon changes the allowable bit depth when the external monitor is enabled?
Would anyone having the same configuration be able to test color bit depth with an external monitor attached? That might give me a bit of extra traction while dealing with Dell.
Thanks
Mike Blake-Knox
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ECarlson 2004-11-05 10:04
I agree with the video memory problem theory. Though it could also be something that just appears to be a video memory problem. I wonder if all the video cards connectors are tightly connected (assuming it's separate from the motherboard).
As you indicate, it would be good to compare it with another identical system.
Does the system actually report 16.Meg video memory? It should only take ~7.4Megs to display 1600x1200x32-bit(4-Byte), so it sounds like you might somehow be limited to 6.Meg video memory, since it would take ~5.6Meg for the resolution you are getting at 32-bit color.
I guess the video card could reserve some of the memory for other things, like texture maps and such. Maybe someone else here has additional information or theories to add.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Mike Blake-Knox 2004-11-05 23:50
Thanks.
dxdiag, System Information, and Display Properties/Adpter all show 16MB. Maybe it's fragmented and doesn't have a large enough contiguous chunk or something. Why it would start happening after 2.9 years would be the question.
Would you perhaps know of a tool that I can use to see how the Video RAM is being used?
Mike Blake-Knox
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ECarlson 2004-11-06 02:49
No, I don't know of such a tool, but I hope someone else here does.
- Eric, www.InvisibleRobot.com
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