[NTLUG:Discuss] Interesting Dell D600 problem

[Rick Cook]

On Thursday 15 March 2007 23:07, Rick Cook wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am now on my 3rd dead LCD Panel for my Dell Latitude D600. The first one
> went out last fall, the second a few weeks ago and the third a couple of
> days ago. I don't know about the first one, however, the basic symptom on
> the last two was that the Panel ID and Panel Size from the LCD BIOS got
> munged and the laptop BIOS now says "unknown panel" for the Panel Type.
>
> This was after ~2 years of no problems.
>
> I run Debian unstable on it staying at least "weekly current" usually using
> the Xorg X server (I have occasionally experimented with the ATI fglrx
> driver, though not recently). I haven't been able to find any mention of
> similar problems in my "googling".
>

By the way, the D600 has a 1400x1050 LCD panel.

Well, I've now done some searching through the Dell Customer Forums and have 
found several instances of this problem being discussed. It appears that it 
is not limited to the D600 or Linux "Big Desktop" mode Xorg. There are 
indications that it has occurred using the ATI fglrx driver and the Windows 
XP driver and on many different ATI Radeon 9000 equipped laptops. The Windows 
symptoms are even more bizarre - autonomous resolution switching, having 
Windows offer to fix the missbehaving screen (and be successful at it), 
having the "dead screen" return to life via a reboot.

The most mentioned "permanent" fix is to replace both the Display and the 
motherboard.


A couple more pieces of entertainment I forgot about in the first message:

One of the replacement screens that I had temporarily was a 1024x768 version. 
At first the company "Dell repair tech" claimed it was exactly the same. 
Eventually, I was able to convince him that it wasn't and he finally came and 
swapped it out with another 1400x1050 (the one that died two days later).

I had a "loaner" laptop with my hard drive swapped in that was working well 
for me. When the tech swapped hard drives back into my machine (with the 
wrong LCD Panel size), the "loaner" had the "unknown panel" problem and had a 
dead screen in Windows even though it was working perfectly for me just 
before I shut the machine down so he could do the swap.


Rick