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General discussion

Dell 8100 Inspiron ATI 7500 Mobility problem

by sd_cherry Nov 22, 2005 7:26PM PST

Hi,
I have a fairly technical hardware question about the Dell 8100 motherboard and the ATI 7500 64mb Mobility graphics card. I recently bought my Dell 8100 Inspiron laptop with a faulty display. Basically, the screen was corrupting itself shortly after booting up (windows was working fine though). I swapped out the ATI card and put in a Nvidia GeForce2 Go 32mb graphics card and the display was fine. The thing is, I really wanted the more powerful ATI card in my laptop so I bought two used ATI 7500 64mb cards and tried both in my laptop and got the same corruption problem. The thing to remember here is one (there are 3 all together) of the screws which secures the graphics card to the motherboard is threaded and just keeps turning. So I'm guessing this is causing a possible grounding problem with the ATI card (which needs to be properly grounded) and not the Nvidia card (which, I guess, does not need to be grounded). Does anyone know the definitive answer as to whether the ATI 7500 card needs to be well secured with tight fitting screws for it to work properly? I'm thinking about getting a slightly oversize screw to secure the ATI card but wanted any input before doing so. Thanks.

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2 Posts

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I could be all wrong here but

by Steven Haninger Nov 23, 2005 12:48AM PST

I show this laptop comes with the Nvidia card and not the ATI. As such, the ATI card needs a proper driver. As well, there may be some BIOS settings depending on whether memory is shared or dedicated. If the laptop came from the factory with the ATI card, I stand corrected. If it came with the Nvidia, it may well be a driver issue.

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Its not a driver issue

by sd_cherry Nov 23, 2005 5:18AM PST

The laptop did originally come from Dell with the ATI 7500 Mobility card installed. I made totally sure the drivers I used for the ATI card came directly from Dell, so I'm confident it's not a driver issue. I'm also pretty confident that there are no bios setting changes required for either the ATI or Nvidia card. FYI - The ATI card is shown in the bios as having 64MB. Since starting this thread I've emailed Dell UK with details of my problem and shall post any response I get back from them.

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