SillyDog701

[James]

Our laptop appeared to give up the ghost yesterday. First, it simply went black on the monitor while my wife was online. She tried alt/ctl/del but could not awaken it and had to hard shut it off. She rebooted and shortly after that it revealed that a crash dump had occurred and... there was more message but the computer crashed a second time. I then rebooted and pressed the F8 key. Instead of going into Safe Mode I chose the repair the computer option. After scanning it reported there was no detectable problem... and then proceeded to crash for me. I also had to hard shut it off and reboot. This time I chose (F8) to restore to an earlier setting (the day before). It did this and then restarted. This time the screen first appeared with colored lines running vertically ... after which it turned completely white. I tried once again after hard shutting it off to reboot but nothing.

This morning we tried once again and it is up and running without any apparent issues.

There had been two critical updates from MS... one on the restore date and one on the crash date. Not sure if they figure into the issues. The question is.... is this the sign of a failing motherboard? The laptop is a four-year-old Dell XPS. Just wondering whether we have a serious problem on our hands or not.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.53 Safari/534.3

[iJohnE]

What's the system currently running? And what is the model number?

I've had issues like this with my dell (Crashes, screen not turning on, hard drive failure, mobo failure; not that those are the issue).

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.55 Safari/534.3

[James]

I can hardly see the monitor screen anymore, John. It's a Dell laptop... XPS M1330 (about four years old) running Win7 Home Premium. After I removed the MS updates things looked good. But this afternoon, as I mentioned, the monitor is barely visible. I looked on Dell's site for graphics card (Nvidia) updates but found none.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8

[Don_HH2K]

There's a 139-page thread on what sounds like your particular issue on the NotebookReview forums. As far as I can tell from reading the first few and last few pages, it's got something to do with the mainboard improperly dispersing heat. Most people in the thread fixed the problem by getting Dell to replace the board.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:2.0b5pre) Gecko/20100830 Firefox/4.0b5pre