Dell vostro 1310 gone bust

arturski

arturski

arturski

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31 Aug 2011
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123
Hi guys hope somebody can help.

My laptop went spastic about a month ago and after doing a bit of research i have a slight suspicion its the graphics chip i hope somebody can recommend a repair shop or any suggestions would be welcome.

Heres the problem:

one day the screen for the laptop just went black and had a white line underneath it. my first thought was "the screen is gone" had a working spare from work so i replaced it but this time when turning it on it was just blank, the backlight is on and the computer powers on as i can hear windows starting up.

I thought i'd test it with an external monitor so i plugged it in and all i could see was a distorted screen with very low res. I managed to navigate to the device manager and I could barely make out an exclamation mark over the display device. Here is a picture

http://i43.tinypic.com/2qxayya.jpg

Could somebody please advise me on whats the best thing to do. Its a really decent laptop with an nvidia card. It has served me well and still got some power in it.


Cheers :)
 
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Ah the nvidia graphics of doom. Please could you actually post the specs of your model.

Nothing you can do. If I recall on this model it is integrated so new mobo time if you can find one. Suspect you may find it easier to buy a new lappy.

What sort of stuff do you do as there are some very cost effective options at the moment.

You may be lucky and find it is a replacable gfx card but I don't know without seeing specs and poss a pic of inside.
 
Thanks Scrutinize,

Its a Pentium Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz, 3 Gb Ram, 256mb Nvidia 8400M, 320Gb HDD.

I found one repair company nearby in London that actually specialize in replacing these exact graphic chips. They have quoted me 145 plus VAT which isnt too bad plus they do it on the spot. The lappy is quite small and in decent nic. The wife used to use it to play sims 3 so maybe now my pc will be free again on weekends :D

I dont think ill be able to get a compact alternative for that money so a repair might be in order. What do you think?
 
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Yep those 8400 cards were known for this and not just in Dell, HP ones suffered a similar fate. I remember when these Vostros came out they were a total bargain.

Up to you on the repair as these are still good laptops. As HP's offers have ended on the 13" Probooks (were £299 for i3 ones with dedicated graphics for a while) there isn't much else around for the money in 13" which is what I guess you want.

How is the battery life these days as that must be close to its end if you haven't replaced it?
 
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surprisingly very good, i bought it back in 2009 and it still serves me a few hours of average stuff like browsing, flash video and work over wi-fi.

I bought it for my final year at uni so needed to be mobile which it is as well as packing some decent gear at 13" cant really go wrong

a lot of people were rocking 17" HPs at that time (PC world stock) lol which is ridiculous to carry around and i got mine for only 500 quid

thanks for the advice Scrutinize I think I will definitely go for the repair, just hope it doesn't burn out on me again as it will be a straight bin job :D
 
The 8400 chip in the Vostro was never an issue like it was in the HP Pavillions. Totally different board and really, issue. The GPU in the HPs was just soldered badly and had little to no cooling, even though it was under the copper heatsink along with the CPU. Those crappy almost blutak like thermal pads were used which never worked.

This was not the same issue with the Vostro. If it's happened in a vostro, it's just down to bad luck. The chip in the vostro carries nothing like the poor rep it got in the Pavilions.
 
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