dorky65

Hi All

Hope someone has encountered this and can lend some advise.
Dell latitude d600, 1.6Ghz centrino, 512 Mbp ram, 20 Gbp HDD, ati mobility radeon 9000 video and driver downloaded from ati site.
XP Pro w/ sp2, all updates downloaded and installed. All new install
cyber power dvd 5 installed. all drivers downloaded from dell support
boot up dell logo has vertical lines, also in windows logo. When into desktop, no lines. When playing dvd movie, horizontal lines all over the screen. whether using cybervision, or Windows media player (ver. 11)
youtube video, no lines.
Question, could it be dvd module? or something else. Plug another dvd module with same results. Thank you for your help.

TriggerFinger

hi,

lines vertical or horizontal on the screen however intermittent may mean video card (or LCD but unlikely) is malfunctioning. run DXDIAG to test the display or use other video diagnostics like these (i have not tried these two before):
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/
or
http://freestone-group.com/download/...yTestSetup.exe

dorky65

ran dxdiag and tested all function, according to test results, everything is working. What can I do next. Thank you.

TriggerFinger

that's strange... the last time i had the same symptom (logo distorted during bootup), i was able to pin it down to RAM.

the symptom that you see (lines in logo during boot) is obviously hardware as no operating system has been started at this point yet. reseat your RAM first or use a known working module (at the moment, just for testing) to see if it improves anything. if this does not work still, remove the hard drive and reboot (yes, physically remove the hard drive. it will not GO into Windows but will certainly give you the DELL logo before it shows the error).

dorky65

okay, so I played with the ram, plug 1 module and tried different slot with different module, same result. Then removed the HDD and boot up, same result still. So my guess is the video chip on the mobo is bad. The only thing I find strange is when playing web video, there is no lines, e.g. youtube videos. Anything else I could/should try? Thanks.

TriggerFinger

did you try another RAM module? i mean not the ones that you have on the laptop already.. but another working RAM module that you can use.

if the lines only appear on some programs, it may not be the video card. i still suspect one or all of the RAM modules. run Memtest86+ on each of the RAM module that you have right now. run the test for like 2 passes on each RAM stick (will take an hour or so).

dorky65

feel so dumb. Downloaded memtest86+ as iso file, copied to cdr, tried to boot from cd but laptop won't run memtest and defaults to windows startup. Also having problems w/ ram, sometimes error code '10' blinks which according to dell is memory module not recognized, then I reslot one or both before laptop boots. Question: How to run memtest86+ properly? Thanks.

TriggerFinger

use ImgBurn or NERO to burn the image of the ISO file into the CD.

DO NOT COPY THE ISO FILE DIRECTLY TO CD.