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This one's got me stumped. Dell Vostro 3700 laptop, Win7, Nvidia Geforce 330M, 1600x900 LCD.

The LCD went (partially) out on this machine. Left 1/3 of screen OK, Right 2/3 would intermittently break up into color bars then go black. I was using it with an external monitor in 'duplicate' mode while the new screen was on order, display there was fine. After installing the new screen, and seeing everything OK, I plugged in the external monitor again, and set it to 'extend' mode. Cool, I've got a big desktop. Went to set it back to 'duplicate' mode again, and it went crazy: I have a normal desktop on the external monitor, but on the laptop display itself, I see only the left half of the desktop, stretched to fill the full width of the screen. Also, the colors are desaturated.
The laptop screen is in this 'left half stretched' mode in all modes now, single display, duplicate display, or extended display. In the extended mode, I have a 'hole' where nothing is visible for the right half of the left virtual desktop. I've eliminated the thought of a hardware problem with the new screen, because when booting, the Dell splash screen, the 'Starting Windows' screen, and the login/password screen all display properly. The login/password screen shows for only a second, then the screen goes black for a second, and comes back 'stretched' and washed out. I can boot from an Ubuntu live disk, and get beautiful 1600x900 video. I have uninstalled the Nvidia driver in Device manager, and rebooted. It came up with the default VGA driver, which displays properly, but only in 640x480 or 1024x768 modes. I backed up user data and did a wipe and factory restore from the recovery partition. It came back as a brand new system, with a stretched screen. I again deleted the driver, and went to the Dell site and downloaded the latest driver, as well as a new BIOS. After installing both, I still have the stretched screen. I'm at my wits end. Anybody got a clue?

First edit, further info:

Yes, Device manager shows two display adapters. One Intel HD and one Nvidia. The Autodetect routine on the Nvidia site told me that drivers for mobile chips are highly customized by the system builder, and I should go to their site. The Dell site gave me driver R289168.exe. Installing that installed both the Intel and Nvidia drivers. Trying to uninstall only the Nvidia driver disables both, and they revert to VGA on next boot. Is there a registry hack that could force use of the Intel only?

Second edit, Workaround: Rather than removing the Nvidia driver, I tried just 'disabling' it in the device manager. This keeps the Intel driver running, and I can now get good 1600x900 video. However, this doesn't persist over a coldboot, so every time I fire up the laptop, I have to stumble thru device manager again on the 'halfscreen' before I can get to real work.

Hennes
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Richard Green
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1 Answers1

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Shouldn't there be TWO VGAs in the system? Intel and Nvidia? And, also, shouldn't it be dynamically switched between those two when required (unless forced discrete GPU use only). Also, newest drivers from Dell seem to not work properly (PhysX part at least). Usually recommended is to use autodetect on Nvidia (and ATI too, incidentally), so proper drivers can be determined.

If yes, then initial screen will be Intel, as this one is default, and those drivers may act up. Have you reinstalled this one as well?

Other possibility is that Nvidia chip gone faulty. And good video in Linux is due to it working off Intel only (which is, in turn, disabled in Windows?).

I'm shooting in the partial darkness here as there's not enough data in question, I'm afraid.

AcePL
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