nvidia problem?

[aisherl]

I have been having a lot of trouble with my sony vaio for the last couple of weeks.

the computer started freezing usually when playing a game like solitaire or after exiting certain internet sites.

at first it was possible to restart it with the repair but gradually it got more difficult and we had to do a system restore

then the green lines appeared around the word vaio when it was started up and it wouldn't boot up. the next screen would be lots of green and whites dots. it had to be switched off with the power button.

i have been through various things - looking at microsoft sites to see if vista was at fault.

However other sites suggested a nvidia problem so I uninstalled the nvidia 8400 and the problems soon went away.

of course it was not possible to play games anymore.

I downlaoded the driver for the nvidia from the sony website and everything looked ok again.

shortly after that the system crashed again and the green lines reappeared.

this time it was possible to recover the system but of course only the standard graphics was there.

we contacted sony support on the premium  line of course as the computer is over one year old and asked if the problem was with the nividia graphics card. they did some tests suggested that we restore to factory settings and siad whats the problem the computer is working

of course its not possible to play games so we  reinstalled the nvidia driver again. Shortly followed by another system crash and the reappearance of the green lines then a screen of green and white dots.

i have now done what is suggested on the sony website for display problems. press f2 when you seen vaio.

we can still see the white dots around the box in the middle of the screen - so does that mean the nvidia graphics card is broken?

what i don't understand is why the problem appears to be intermittent?

what should the next steps be? any suggestions

[Blencogo]

Hi aisherl, sorry to hear your problems.

Some models are prone to graphics problems.  Can you give us a bit more information: -

What model Vaio do you have?

Does the same fault happen when you connect to an external monitor?

What version of the nVidia Graphics Driver do you have installed?

Does the Vaio get hotter than usual?

[aisherl]

Hi there

thanks for replying

I have a Sony Vaio VGC-LT1S. the driver for  the nvidia geforce 8400m gt is dated 20/6/2007 version 7.15.11.5609 is that what you mean?

I haven't got an external monitor anymore.

I haven't noticed it getting hotter but i haven't thought of checking that.

thx

[wolvo7]

Hi

I'm kinda jumping in the discussion because i have exactly the same problem. My laptop just froze when I was playing a game and the screen went black. The only way to make it work again was a hard shut down.

When it restarted, the VAIO logo wasn't written as smoothly as before, it had white lines coming out of the letters, then during the boot process the normally black screen showed vertical green dots. The PC loaded till it got to the point where you usually select users, then blacked out and rebooted again. It's been doing that every time I try rebooting normally.

I've tried safe mode, which works fine, that's how I'm writing this. I've tried booting from the vista recovery disc that I have created but the repair mode doesn't find any errors. I've done a system restore to 2 days ago but it didn't change anything. As aisherl said some forums say that it's the graphics card, which would make sense because this all started while i was playing.

So I'm quite at loss of what to do. I usually use an external monitor but the dispay is directed to the monitor when the users selection window appears normally, and as I don't see this window anymore the monitor is useless. I can't switch to it in safe mode either.

Was wondering if you knew how to change the keyboard language in safe mode too because my laptop is azerty and i have been using it with a bluetooth qwerty keyboard so I changed the language on the language bar. The problem is that this bar doesn't appear in safe modem so I'm stuck typing on an azerty keyboard configured on qwerty, thus some letters aren't where they should be....

Model: VAIO VGN-FZ38M    

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT GPU

The laptop dosn't seem hotter than usual I think.

Please help us! Thank you