Video adapter fried
The video adapter in my laptop was just fried. 
It’s a Dell XPS Gen 2 with a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra, and it’s been running flawlessly for 10 months. I was running some 3d graphics when suddenly the screen froze, and weird animated patterns appeared all over the screen. Admittedly I was running TwinView and pushing it a little, but it’s built for just that, so it should be able to handle it. When rebooting even the BIOS splash doesn’t show up, although the machine itself appears to start up normally. Luckily I have 2 months left of my on-site service, so now the “Dell man” should come and replace the adapter by tuesday. Still it sucks.
September 28th, 2006 at 7:55 am
Hey, the exact same thing just happened to me yesterday. You’re the second person online that I’ve found has had a faulty GeForce Go 6800 Ultra. I was in the middle of a normal gaming session when it happened and now it won’t boot into the O/S and even the post screen looks glitchy.
I’m pretty scared as I’m working in the Middle East currently and am out of warranty. Dell’s service here isn’t primary, so I have to go through a local service department and everything takes ages to be accomplished here. I’m so sad my baby is out for the count and hope things get resolved in even 5x the time you had to wait.
I assume the video card is easily replacable though…? As in it’s not a difficult part to take out and put in?
September 28th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
That’s unfortunate. But once you get a new adapter the replacement isn’t difficult. You have to remove quite some parts to get to the adapter, though. Good luck with it.