Electronic adventures
Last night I was sitting at my computer when the display suddenly froze. After a few seconds, it went black. When it didn't wake up after a minute, I decided to go make dinner in the hopes it would wake up in the interim. Unfortunately, when I came back, the resolution was about 640x480 and there was an ominous message box saying "The display adapter has stopped functioning properly. Please reboot. When Windows restarts, it will try to send a diagnostic message to Microsoft." Or some such. So I dutifully rebooted. And the Dell splash screen had all sorts of weird artifacts on it. Then that disappeared and the display just showed grey pixels all over.
I left it until after dinner, wishfully thinking that leaving it alone for 45 minutes would magically fix it. It didn't. I eventually managed to boot in safe mode (kinda tricky when the boot menu screen was completely unreadable) and that did work once Windows loaded. So, something was wrong with the display adapter. I called Dell, but was told they can't help since I'm out of warranty.
So I spent the next few hours first figuring out which graphics card I wanted (nVidia GeForce 8800 GT) and then which manufacturer I wanted (XFX) and then which of the half dozen variations I wanted (can't remember) and then where to buy it from (newegg). Oh yeah, and I spent about 20 minutes trying to confirm I did actually have a PCIe interface.
This morning, I had the brilliant idea of disabling the display adapter so I could boot normally. And that worked. The splash screen and boot screen are still garbled, but at least Windows can now start normally. I'm hoping that it really is a bad graphics card and there isn't some way to fix it, since I already ordered a new card. And that was how I spent the whole evening last night. What fun.
I left it until after dinner, wishfully thinking that leaving it alone for 45 minutes would magically fix it. It didn't. I eventually managed to boot in safe mode (kinda tricky when the boot menu screen was completely unreadable) and that did work once Windows loaded. So, something was wrong with the display adapter. I called Dell, but was told they can't help since I'm out of warranty.
So I spent the next few hours first figuring out which graphics card I wanted (nVidia GeForce 8800 GT) and then which manufacturer I wanted (XFX) and then which of the half dozen variations I wanted (can't remember) and then where to buy it from (newegg). Oh yeah, and I spent about 20 minutes trying to confirm I did actually have a PCIe interface.
This morning, I had the brilliant idea of disabling the display adapter so I could boot normally. And that worked. The splash screen and boot screen are still garbled, but at least Windows can now start normally. I'm hoping that it really is a bad graphics card and there isn't some way to fix it, since I already ordered a new card. And that was how I spent the whole evening last night. What fun.