justalaptopuser

Honorable
Jun 14, 2012
2
0
10,510
I have an old laptop which is 5 years old. About half a year ago, the screen started giving me issues: light green is appearing where large black areas are supposed to be and large pink areas where large white areas are supposed to be. Some pixels are also smeared and "out of focus".

I know it is an old laptop and it is dying. However, buying a cheap external monitor fixed the issues (implying the issue is the graphics card). However, recently, when booting, the screen is black instead of showing login screen. Disabling the graphics card driver (nVidia) in safe mode solved that issue. However, now I cannot output video signal to an external monitor(I don't have the option).

I'm really hoping to extend the life of the laptop until Windows 8 comes out or if by some miracle I can extend it by a year until Haswell intel chip is out.

My question is: can I output the video signal to an external screen without having the graphics card enabled? Are there any "generic" drivers out there which can do this or any other tricks?
 

ram1009

Distinguished
There seems to be a flaw in your logic. Your GPU drives both displays so your statement that the GPU is implicated as the issue by the fact that the external monitor works fine is bogus, IMHO. Further, there probably is no discrete "graphics card". In all probability the GPU is integrated onto the MB and therefore cannot be disabled.
 

justalaptopuser

Honorable
Jun 14, 2012
2
0
10,510
Mmmmmmmm...... I don't quite understand but then I'm really not that tech savvy. If I do understand you correctly, the graphic card is not the issue but another component?

I know beyond a doubt that disabling the nvidia display driver allows me boot and login to windows successfully each time, though scrolling is sluggish and I cannot output video signal to an external monitor. There are also other annoying issues which I mentioned which can come and go, but recently, they mostly come and stay for quite a while.

I don't know if it'll shed some more light, but when I was able to output to an external monitor, it sometimes was very bluish like and very hard to see the color red or shades of it. No amount of tweaking on my side seemed to have changed it but after a while it started working perfectly.

On two occasions, while trying to enable the driver, I saw a quick memory dump before the screen went blank (too fast to read anything).

Seems like I'm out of luck, if I understand you correctly.