MAJOR problems with display...

[Abos]

I purchased my comp (a Dell Dimesion 8250) about 1 year ago for use at college. Around September, there were a few times that, when I went to turn on my comp, nothing would be displayed. The computer would be on and running, but the monitor would not get any signal, and the lights on the mouse and keyboard would not light up. This happened every now and then for a few months. About a month ago, I started getting a Windows error message upon successful reboot after one of these mishaps. The message says that "Windows has recovered from a serious error". It also says that "the driver for the display device was unable to complete a drawing operation".

More recently, the computer has been locking up somewhat often, the monitor shuts itself off and I need to reboot to fix the problem. I get the same error messages as above.

In the past couple days specifically, the computer has also been suddenly locking up and going into something like 640x400 resolution with 4-bit color.

I've tried playing with different settings and updating/rolling back different drivers, but nothing seems to work. Additionally, when I tried updating to the latest ATI Catalyst drivers, Windows froze on the boot screen, then crashed to the BSoD (there was an error message that said it got stuck in an infinite loop).

Seeing as I'm still under warranty (and will be for another 2 years), I'm probably gonna contact Dell soon, but I was wondering if anyone here could provide any insight into the matter????


My system specs:

P4 2.4 533mhz
512MB RDRAM
I850E chipset
ATI Radeon 9700 TX graphics card
120gig ATA100 hard drive



Thanks.

 

[Abos]

I forgot to add: I'm using Windows XP Home.

 

[LemonHerbWRX]

I would say contact them, warrenties are a good thing. You may want to set your computer not to reboot on memory dump so that it will display the bluescreen and you can see what is really doing on. To do that right click my computer and choose properties, then choose the advanced tab, from there you click the start up and recovery button and in the system failure area uncheck the Automatically restart option.

As far as the video problem goes I will give the standard responce of updating any drivers you can for your system as well as any bios updates. But it does deffinatly sound like something could be wrong with your monitor, or its connection.