Hi all. I was wondering if anyone has had an experience getting video cards replaced under warranty from Dell and would be willing to share their story? Is it difficult?
My m18x r2 has two 7970m in crossfire, and I'm pretty one sure of them has failed. Over the past week or two I've been getting hard lockups while playing games. Today I noticed the mouse cursor graphic had become corrupted (but a reboot fixed it). Then after a lockup earlier this evening, I couldn't even boot to my desktop. I could boot into safe mode, so I tried installing older drivers, tried uninstalling the drivers completely... nothing worked, it would just go to a black screen after it said it was starting windows. Finally I had the idea that if it was failing hardware, one of the cards might still actually work so i discovered that if i disabled a specific card in the device manager then I could boot and use my computer... but not play games. For whatever reason, dxdiag thinks I don't have a directx compatible device installed. (Integrated video works okay too, but I didn't buy an alienware so I could game on a HD 4000.)
I haven't called tech support yet, was going to wait until tomorrow morning. Thankfully I got the top warranty package and it doesn't expire for another 10 months or so. I was just wondering if anyone could shed some light on how the process should go, whether I'll have a hard time convincing them it's the hardware, how long it should take, etc.
My m18x r2 has two 7970m in crossfire, and I'm pretty one sure of them has failed. Over the past week or two I've been getting hard lockups while playing games. Today I noticed the mouse cursor graphic had become corrupted (but a reboot fixed it). Then after a lockup earlier this evening, I couldn't even boot to my desktop. I could boot into safe mode, so I tried installing older drivers, tried uninstalling the drivers completely... nothing worked, it would just go to a black screen after it said it was starting windows. Finally I had the idea that if it was failing hardware, one of the cards might still actually work so i discovered that if i disabled a specific card in the device manager then I could boot and use my computer... but not play games. For whatever reason, dxdiag thinks I don't have a directx compatible device installed. (Integrated video works okay too, but I didn't buy an alienware so I could game on a HD 4000.)
I haven't called tech support yet, was going to wait until tomorrow morning. Thankfully I got the top warranty package and it doesn't expire for another 10 months or so. I was just wondering if anyone could shed some light on how the process should go, whether I'll have a hard time convincing them it's the hardware, how long it should take, etc.