I’ve mentioned in recent Weekly Rewinds about intermittent problems with my trusty (now not so trusty) Dell XPS m1330 laptop. It seems I’ve fallen foul of the known defect in some of the Nvidia cards shipped by Dell. I’ve had my machine just about 18 months now and I’ve always loved it. In recent weeks though the screen started flickering randomly, I got funky blue lines all over the place that make you think you’re having an acid flashback, and finally it packed in completely. Dell released BIOS updates last year to try and limit the damage this problem would cause, I upgraded to them quickly but it seems it hasn’t saved me. Now when you turn on the power the display doesn’t really show anything, after a few mins you just get weird vertical lines on the screen. It can’t be used at all sadly. I thought about making a video of what it does but then I found there were already videos all over Youtube of the same thing. I’m naturally lazy and I’m not going to duplicate the effort, so you can see what happens in the video below. Read the rest of this entry »