laptop display garbled after a few minutes

I bought a used Dell Latitude CPi 3 months ago. Since last night it is having major display problems. After a few minutes on the display gets garbled, or starts flashing on/off, and then may go off entirely. I've been shutting it down at that time.

One thing I notice is in device mgr there are two default monitors defined. If I remove them and then run the hardware installer they both show back up.

This came from the seller with no OS so I installed XP home myself. Before I start trying to see about returning this as broken would like to be sure that it is a hardware issue and not something else.

How can I be sure?

Marty

 

Have you installed drivers for the mobo and video after installing XP? Did they come with the machine? If they're correct and installed would consider the machine defective.

 

XP installed the video and monitor drivers automatically. I'm puzzled though that while it recognized the video driver - I'm assuming it's correct since I bought it used and don't have any docs for it - xp used the default monitor driver.

And it installed two of these monitor drivers.

But since it's worked fine all this time I'm probably *******, odds are it is a hardware failure and since I bought it used have no recourse.

If I did want to look into buying a replacement part, how would I go about it? Not even sure where the fault is, could be the video card, display unit, even the mobo right?

 

Don't know. Not familiar with NY area; would ask around, or maybe wait to see if anyone who knows will answer.

 

I think it's fixed!

I have several Win boxes in my home/office and have always set the paging file to the same size as installed RAM and not had any problems doing this with statically defined RAM.

A few hours ago though I reset the page file from user defined to system managed and the display has been fine since doing that - and also removing/letting Win reinstall the video driver.

Looks like one or both of these have fixed the problem.

I am a happy camper.

Marty

 

Whew!! Thanks for the report. Good luck.

Edit: Everest or Belarc adviser might be useful to get info about the hardware for future reference. Search either on Google.

 

Hey Sparrow thanks for the tip, I'm going to d/l both of these now. Maybe this will also help me get rid of the two default monitors that display on devmgr and install whatever should really be there.

 

Well I spoke waaay too soon. It's having the same problem again. Funny that changing the page file settings seemed to fix things temporarily though. Think I'll check on Dell's site for the latest drivers. Everest and Belarc didn't report any problems.

Here's hoping.

 

They won't. Their function here is to identify the hardware so you get the correct drivers. If you need any help searching, post the model number and any details from those programs that might apply.