I see you are aware of the defect but what can really cause you to lose all remaining hair and sanity is it can fail, then come back then fail again.
You see folk "re-balling the GPU", baking the motherboard and more to bring it back. I do not endorse ANY of those methods but it's your hardware, your choice. Why can't I endorse any of those? Because at best it's temporary and doesn't address the issue directly. Any shop could get itself into trouble if it did any of the shade tree mechanic fixes.
Hope you fair better now that you know.
Bob
I have a dell vostro 1400 laptop running xp that i bought in 2008. it has a NVIDIA 8400m gs display adapter. all of a sudden out of the blue it will lose it's display and only display colored lines in a static form, at this point it will not even boot.
then i am able to boot using an xp startup disc. at this point i disable the NVIDIA 8400m gs driver. i am then able to use the computer normally except the display features are not as good and i still have staticy dots and lines on my screen which are not nearly as bad as before i disabled the NVIDIA 8400m gs driver
.
after a week or 2 the staticy dots and lines on my screen disappear and i am able to to re-enable the NVIDIA 8400m gs driver and everything including boot up works normally just like the computer was brand new. after a month or so the same thing happens again
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i have deleted and re-installed the driver from the dell site many times but this doesn't help. i also tried the drivers from the NVIDIA site. same thing.
i've heard that the NVIDIA 8400m gs adapter in these laptops is defective but if that's true why would the machine work normally as it does now?
can anybody help me?

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