Dell Latitude D820 Display / Driver Issues?

Question

A friend of mine has a Dell D820.

A few months ago, I upgraded his OS to Windows 7.
Just a week or two ago, we installed more memory (RAM).

The laptop had been working great for about 4 days after we installed the RAM.
He had left his laptop on for a few hours, left the office, and came back, the screen had shut off.
He could not get the screen to turn back on after restarting, not even showing the splash screen or any BIOS menus.

We took out the RAM, Battery, Internal Battery, and tried to reset the unit.
This did not help us.

Plugged in an external monitor, so we could see whats going on, and it's getting a BSOD error about reinstalling display driver.
We installed the proper display driver from Dell.com and continued to get the BSOD, right after the "Starting Windows" screen.

I then uninstalled the driver and rebooted the machine. The machine started up fine with no BSOD error. Still using the external monitor. 
If we reinstall the driver, we get the BSOD error.

Note: We have been using the FN key and the F8 to switch between the laptop screen and external monitor to see if anything has changed.

We performed several tests. During one of the boot tests, the laptops display had worked.
This was a pre-boot test.

Now I am completely lost.
Please excuse all teh details. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

- Windows BSODs are often due to heating issues inside your computer. If you are using a desktop computer then try to install a better cooling fan. Or simply you may turn off your computer for sometime and start computer again.

- BSOD may also happen when there is low RAM installed on the system. Some programs need more memory space to run and adding RAM would give your computer much needed boost.

- One of the most important aspects of operating system is its registry. If there is minor corruption in this part then it may lead you to errors similar to Windows 7 Blue Screen. There are some readily available registry cleaners on the market.

As we cannot stress enough that manual modification of registry is dangerous as well as difficult but any mistake in its modification can cause some of your programs to stop running.

It would be wise to select a registry cleaner such as McAfee secured RegInOut that also offers you a feature of PC optimization.

Using its PC optimizer feature you can even remove browser junk, system junk and also manage the start up items to increase the boot speed of Windows computer.

? · Answer

I believe I have an answer for you but its not good news. You had started off by stating that you upgraded the computer to windows 7. My guess would be that it had windows xp pro. The difference being that with windows 7 aero it uses a lot more power from the gpu. The reason that your computer is crashing after the driver is that the gpu is failing. You can use a faulty gpu with xp until you load a 3d app, with windows 7 it wants to use that function for the desktop. The issue is most likely that the ball soldering is not making a good connection due to warping of the board caused by overheating or faulty design. I have worked on several dell laptops with this issue. He can either get the board replaced or fixed ( flux and blow torch to gpu ), or go back to xp and not run 3d apps until it fails completely.

Good Luck

? · Answer

There's a link to a driver info page on the Windows site at the source that you may find useful. You could also try doing a system restore as per the BSOD. 

-- Ryan
Windows Outreach Team

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Dell Latitude D820 Display / Driver Issues?

3 Answers