my dell
Sup guys, new addition to the list here. I've been using linux since the
2.0.30 days, and debian since hamm was popular. Almost tried to become a
developer once but I couldn't find any interesting packages to manage, and I
didn't really like the idea of getting 200+ emails a day from debian-devel
:). Anyway some of that has changed, because I kinda like the idea of
getting 40+ emails now when*ever* I check email. Oh yeah, more about me, I
do a little php development over at http://e.themes.org. Great stuff. Been
kinda inactive lately since I'm getting so loaded down at school and I have
to get my grades up as high as I can so I can have a chance of getting
accepted into certain colleges for next year.
My main purpose of this email is this. The laptop of question is my Dell
Inspiron 3200. You may have read my response to the "Best Laptop" thread
started here a few days ago, and noticed that I've had a few problems with
the monitor. It started acting up many many moons ago (heh), and I've sent
it in over a dozen times to the Dell factories to be fixed, but every single
time it's come back it has either not been fixed or something else was
wrong. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating, and I've been
angry at Dell's tech support for awhile now. My next step is calling tech
support again, talking to a supervisor, and just requesting an entire
replacement due to defectiveness of parts, because I'm convinced that's the
only way to fix it.
What exactly is going wrong with it? Well, the only way I can describe it is
like this... Say you have a certain television channel you don't actually
receive on your TV, and your provider puts a descrambler on it. That's what
my montior starts to look like sometimes. The screen gets all scrambled up,
but you can still see through it to the desktop and everything else. Then
other times the monitor will start to flash on and off, like the small
pointy button that turns it off is being pressed repeatedly. A friend of
mine at school told me that this happened to his old laptop, and that it's a
certain small connector cable somewhere inside the laptop that's been
affected by some unknown force. Probably heat. He also said that the only
way to fix it is for the whole laptop to be replaced, just keeping the
original hard drive. He did also tell me that there IS one way you can fix
it in linux, and that's by setting the clock speed slower than it's fastest
possible speed. It would fix the problem, but there would be a slower
refresh rate. I have no idea how to "underclock" a laptop, much less
actually open up the case and get inside. I don't really like the idea of
doing that right yet though, because the thing is still under warranty and I
don't really want to void it. Do you guys have any suggestions?
Thanks,
- webfreak
webfreak@themes.org
http://e.themes.org php developer
Reply to: