I have a Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop that is experiencing an intermittent problem. Objects on the screen will occasionally get… well, “smeared” is the only word I can think of to describe it. You know how if you scribble some lines on a piece of paper and rub your thumb over them, how the ink smears in the direction that you’re rubbing? It’s like that. For example, the bright blue and yellow Straight Dope logo at the top of the page will have a dim, coarse blue and yellow region to the right of it.
I tried adjusting various settings (resolution, colors, acceleration, etc.) and none of them worked. I hooked the laptop to an external monitor and the problem never showed up there, which led me to believe that there was a problem with the display itself. The weird thing is, though, when I play a game the problem never appears. The display will be messed up for hours while I’m surfing the net, using MS Office, checking my mail, etc., but when I start up Age of Empires the problem goes away. It’s strange.
So, the questions…
(1) Any idea what might be wrong?
(2) Is there some difference in the way that computers render graphics in games vs. other applications? If so, what?
I’m going to call Dell Tech Support next week and see if they can do anything, but I thought I’d throw the question out here and see if anyone could help. Thanks!
Odd that a notebook would have this problem in static text display mode but not gaming.
Suggestions.
1: Depending on your current OS go to the DELL download site for the latest video drivers and system BIOS updates. Apply any necessary updates to bring your system up to the most recent driver sets.
2: Go into the system panel performance tweaking section and knock the video acceleration back a notch or two. If the problem dissappears you can pretty sure it’s driver and not hardware related.
3: Make sure you have the latest MS directX drivers.
4: Gaming environments often default to resolution and refresh rates that are slightly different than that of the main static windows screen which is probably why the problem goes way when gaming.
Go to your monitor definition under the advanced section of the windows video configuration applet and see what it is set for. Try a generic windows 800x600 or 1024x768 laptop screen definition, or whatever your default screen reolution should be. Unlike CRTs notebook displays usually have one fixed preferred resolution level and while they can display lower resolutions they typically look terrible. I don’t know if your laptop driver definition lists refresh rates but if it does you might try changing these as well.
5: As a last point make sure the video driver that is defined in your system is the precise one that your notebook hardware wants. There are sometimes similar, but slightly different video chipsets and if somehow your notebook has been forced to apply an incorrect chipset definition you may have some odd problems.
6: Remove and re-seat you SODIMM RAM chips.
If none of the above work I would begin to suspect a hardware problem.
I think this is your video chipset. There are numerous versions and interations of the mach64 chipset bouncing around. You might want to check this out first.
First video: Super-VGA
Chipset: ATI Rage Mobility (Port Probed)
Memory: 8192 Kbytes
RAMDAC: ATI Mach64 integrated 15/16/24/32-bit DAC w/clock
with 6-bit wide lookup tables (or in 6-bit mode))
(programmable for 6/8-bit wide lookup tables)
Attached graphics coprocessor:
Chipset: ATI Mach64
Memory: 8192 Kbytes
Try playing with your color depth settings as well and see if this makes a difference.
headshok, have you installed some kind of a firewall? (A recent fad among “crackers” is to go in via ‘wireless computing’ hardware.) There are free, but adequate, safeguards.
Thanks for the tips, guys. Sea Sorbust, I don’t have a firewall, but I should probably look into it. I don’t do any wireless computing, though.
astro, I’ve already tried most of the things you mentioned: I adjusted the acceleration, resolution and color, booted up in safe mode, and downloaded the newest driver for my video card from Dell. I haven’t tried reseating the RAM yet, though. I also ran the Dell diagnostic CD and checked my DirectX with dxdiag.exe. Everything checked out OK. Right now, the screen looks fine, so I’ll have to wait until the problem crops up and try some of the solutions again.
Something else I ran into in looking at google threads about your unit is that apparently your specific unit’s touchpad drivers are not that well behaved and can cause other seemingly un-related system problems (possibly video?). If there is a touchpad driver update for your unit you might want to apply this as well.