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N Videa 6800 GTO problem with Dell 8400


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#1
bigmanzidane

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Hi there,
I rebooted my Dell 8400 2 weeks ago after I could not lose a virus.
All works fine except every so often when I start up the screen is a little snowy and hard to read.
When I go to device manager the graphics driver has a yellow circle with a black apostrophe.

I have tried everything, downloading new drivers, uninstalling the old driver and reinstalling the driver with the Dell
resource disc supplied, but when it tries to reinstall the driver I get the blue screen of death!!! I have also been getting
a message saying the driver isn't signed??? What does this mean.

After several tries of this and switching off, after 30 minutes or so and on the 12th time of trying it seems to sort itself.
Then when I don't get the snowy screen the driver installs no problem.

I have contacted NVidea who say it sounds like a GPU problem and I need to return to Dell.

Does anyone else have any ideas what may be causing this?

I have Windows XP and updated the driver to Bios A09.
I am not much of an expert but this is driving me nuts and I am close to buying a new pc.

Many thanks
Iain
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#2
makai

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I rebooted my Dell 8400 2 weeks ago after I could not lose a virus.

The title says you "formatted", while this sentence says you "rebooted". Did you actually format and reinstall Windows?

All works fine except every so often when I start up the screen is a little snowy and hard to read.

This sounds like a bad video card. Is the screen "snowy" from the second you power on the system, or is it only snowy in Windows? Is it snowy in bios?

When I go to device manager the graphics driver has a yellow circle with a black apostrophe.

Are there any other marks in Device manager showing up. Please also scroll the Device manager window if you can't see all device entries.

a message saying the driver isn't signed??? What does this mean.

It basically means Dell didn't pay M$ money to have M$ approve of the driver you have. It doesn't mean much as far as your machine is concerned.

"Snow" normally indicates a bad video card. However, it can also be caused by a bad video cable, poor contact of the vid card and motherboard, or even a bad +12v rail coming from the power supply. What you might try is removing/reseating the vid card and trying again. Be sure to remove the AC plug before going into the machine, and also ground yourself somewhere on a bare metal area to discharge any static electricity you might be carrying.
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#3
lurky

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:) sounds to me that you've inadvertently installed the wrong video driver. Could you read me the express service code off the back of the PC? They're normally about 7 characters long on a black and white bar coded sticker, I'll see if I can get you a link for the proper drivers.

We should probably make sure the right drivers are installed before blaming faulty hardware.
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