I bought a Dell XPS M1710 off of ebay for £115 figuring that from what the guy described he’d merely forgotten to install the drivers but he was selling it for spares and repairs anyway. It arrived and I found the problem to be more serious than I thought, I searched the problem and found that the graphics card had a problem. The only solution as far as the internet was concerned was to bake the graphics card in the oven at just under 200 degrees centigrade so that the connections would all be put back in their place. It failed, I was stuck with a dead card for a busted laptop, £115 not well spent. Looking into it further I gave in and decided to order a replacement, the replacement arrived and lasted about a week, I took it to my college where as I started Half-Life 2 the screen showed a load of red wavy lines over the original picture, it then went black and finally BSOD’d. I was so furious that the £60 I’d spent on a new card had gone to waste all because I had to satisfy my own ego and get the thing to work rather than knowing my boundaries and selling it on, I later figured out that it was the fans that had stopped working and the card was just overheating and disabling itself before any serious damage was done, I found a program called i8Kfangui which allows manual override of the system fans but of course, stupid me, Windows 7 x64 doesn’t allow unsigned drivers. Found a tutorial on how to self sign the driver in order to bypass this stupid problem but gave up. As the XPS only had 2GB of RAM I decided the best course of action was to install Windows 7 x86, I left the laptop on to install Windows 7 x86 and severe damage was done to the card as it had no cooling system to protect it from overheating, need less to say the replacement card now permanently damaged is being replaced again by the people I purchased it from originally.
i8Kfangui website: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/
People have done it and had positive results. I overcooked it I believe.
what a load of crap. you obviously have too much time on your hands and you are a rude little fucker also. typical pom.
“A rude little fucker”. Tell me, are you sure I’m the only one? Too much time on my hands? Around the time this was created, yes. Now, not so much currently. Describe a typical English person for me.
I actually had a very similar situation to this. Bought a m1710 for about the same price. Worked for a while then the card died. I decided instead of the oven trick I’d try it with a heat gun which worked. It does go out every few months or so but another heat gun run works. Just remember to use flux (google it) which will stop the cards joints drying up.
As for i8Kfangui you just mash f8 as the laptop boots then select *Disable driver signature enforcement* then it works.
I am typing this in my just repaired M1710 btw 😛
Oh, thanks man 😀
I’ve since repaired and sold this laptop. Wasn’t worth the hassle really. So through sake of nostalgia I bought an equally chunky, snazzy gaming laptop to replace it. 😛
MSI GX740. Pretty much the m1710 of 2009.
Find it quite interesting ppl couldn’t fix it yet. I had bought mine in 2006 and still works despite the same issues from gfx I had a few times. The thing was that u have to replace the cooling part of the gfx. Originally it was done with some average thermal paste(looks more like a glue) and there was too much space between the gpu chip and gpu heatsink, which in turn means there’s a lot of heat bubbles coming with big temperature on it and around. So bake it several times .. at least 3x 10min 220°C to allow finer solution. And fix the cooling part on gpu to hold more tight with heatsink. Use also artic silver 5 or similar, apply only that much to have a small layer and you’re done. Overall cost? 10euros or so.
It’s a good plan, trouble is I’d only had the laptop for about a month. I’d never even heard of the issue. Just Half Life 2 and suddenly the 2nd GPU is buggered. Fans never kicked in. Had to convert it to 32bit windows just to use a dell fan control software that actually turns the things on. Anyways. I figured move on and buy something a bit closer with the times.
Good tip, i’m buying a used one that still works.