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Re: Anybody using a Dell Inspiron 8500/8600 with the ATI card?



Hello!

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 12:31:36AM -0800, Joe Emenaker wrote:
> I've got a I8600 with the NVidia card in it. In the two years since I've 
> had it, I've learned to *never* put it into suspend-to-ram mode. If you 
> do this, everything suspends just fine... but, upon waking, the display 
> doesn't turn back on.

Well, I have T43 with i810 card, but still. I have familiar problem (kernel 2.6.20) that
can be worked around in such a way: after resuming change the console to
the 1st and then to the 7th (chvt 1; chvt 7) one more time. May be it will help.


> The machine still *works* in this state (I can type commands blindly and 
> see the hard disk working... I can even ssh into the laptop and run 
> commands that way), but nothing I've ever tried has gotten the screen to 
> come back on after a suspend-to-ram.
> 
> I've read countless forums, but nobody seems to have the magic bullet. 
> I've tried using "chvt" to switch to a console before suspend, I've 
> tried killing/restarting X to wake up the screen, I've tried writing 
> various values to /proc/acpi/video/VID/lcd, and I've tried playing with 
> "xset dpms force on|off". Nothing has worked.
> 
> Then, I had a moment of inspiration. By most accounts I've read, this 
> only happens to the Dells with NVidia cards in them. So, it occurred to
> me that I could get an ATI card for the I8600 on eBay and install it. 
> However, I wanted to make sure that I'm not setting myself up for 
> heartache, here. So, I have a few questions:
> 
> 1 - Can the ATI drive the 1920x1200 WUXGA screen that I've got? The ones 
> I see on eBay are all 32MB cards, and I'm not sure what the RAM is on my 
> NVidia. My calculations tell me that 32MB should be *far* more than what 
> I need.... but I just want to be *sure* that someone's got it working.
> 
> 2 - Are you able to use suspend-to-ram and wake it and get the screen back?
> 
> 3 - Any ideas on how I can figure out how much ram my NVidia has?
> 
> - Joe



-- 
K.A., enfant terrible



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