• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Dell XPS 710 video issue or...?

B

brettt777

Charter Member
Last night I fired up FSX on my old XPS 710 desktop because I was tired of getting BSOD and GSOD on my G73 because my G940 and/or Trackir 5 apparently doesn't like Win 7. I thought I would see if they work better in XP. Well, a few seconds after my flight loaded, the whole thing started freakin out. Weird graphic anomalies and colors and after about 15-20 seconds it froze up completely (except for the audio). I had to do a hard shut down and then when I tried to restart, I got no video at all. The tower powered up but never did anything else. So I left it off for about five minutes and tried it again (with the G940 and Trackir unplugged). Well it appeared to load XP okay but then as soon as I started moving the mouse around I instantly got weird graphics and froze up solid. I have had this machine for about five years and it has never really gave me any problems. Since I got the G73, I actualy rarely use the thing but on occasion I will fire it up to do some music editing or so0mething because it has the software for that. Never had an issue until now.
I have been a technician of one sort or another for over 30 years. Any time I have seen something like this (but not on a PC) it has been a video issue. So what does anyone think? This XPS 710 has a duo-core 2.8 ghz CPU, 2 GB RAM, and a GTS 8600 nVidia graphics card.
I have been planning a major upgrade/replacement of my desktop anyway but I don't have the $$$ right now.
 
I'm thinking it could be a couple of things. It might the power supply is failing and can no longer supply enough amps to the video card. It could be the video card is failing. Heat will also cause problems with video cards, when is the last time you cleaned the dust from inside the case and out of the video card cooling system?
 
stansdds said:
I'm thinking it could be a couple of things. It might the power supply is failing and can no longer supply enough amps to the video card. It could be the video card is failing. Heat will also cause problems with video cards, when is the last time you cleaned the dust from inside the case and out of the video card cooling system?
Click to expand...

Well, I haven't had the thing open in quite a while. But then, I hardly use the thing anymore. But, it's never had an issue in the past. I am kind of leaning towards the power supply myself now because after the thing starts up and should be completely booted up, it doesn't show up at all on my home network. It always did before. The outside LEDs and fans come on but other than that it is completely dead.
 
I don't think its the power supply. If it were the PS, the rig would not even power up, and the vid card is powered by the mobo,
no connection to PS. I would open up the box and do a good dusting out then check and see if the memory sticks and vid card
are seated properly. Then see if she will boot up, if not pull one of the memory sticks out and try, could be a bad stick of memory
or a dimm slot has gone bad. (maybe)

Joe
 
I have a Dell XPS 710 upgraded to the 720 by Dell and it has the newer 680i motherboard. The old 710 motherboard ate more memory modules than I care to count...Dell did the upgrade for free even though I was not the original owner. I also would take all the memory sticks out save one and test each stick. You'll have enough RAM to boot with 1GB at a time. The power supply is heavy and built very well for this unit...doesn't mean it can't fail but I'm betting on memory as well. It won't hurt to clean out the video card and the CPU/Heatsink either. Good luck
Ted
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top