warlucith said:
Ok, I'll start at the beginning...
Some system files got messed up on my computer and after a day on the phone with Dell tech support, they determined that I needed to wipe my hard drive and start over from scratch. During this process, they had me open up my computer to remove the hard drives (they wanted to test to see if a problem was being caused by my HD or CD drive).
I spent the next 3 days on the phone with Dell tech support changing settings myself and waiting as they made changes and installed drivers remotely. Everything was going seemingly smoothly until it was time to install my video card drivers. At first the installation failed, and the Dell technician had me change some settings, then in the middle of a second attempt to install them, my cat walked on my laptop, stepped on the power button, and the computer shut off. After that, spent a long time trying to get it to install correctly, but nothing would work.
After hanging up with Dell, I tried to log into some games, but they wouldn't start. I looked at the driver the Dell technician was trying to install and I didn't recognize it (NVIDA Display Driver v301.42) , so I then went on the Dell website and downloaded the Driver for my video card (nVidia 280M). The installation went smoothly and I could now launch and play games and watch videos unlike before.
I figured things were fine, so I stopped contacting Dell. However, a few problems began to arise with the computer:
-The computer is VERY hot. Much hotter than it ever was before. I can't keep it on my lap anymore, because it burns my legs.
-The computer will randomly freeze or the screen will change to all one color (pale green for example) and parts of it will flash, forcing me to restart. This only happens if I'm in the middle of a game or watching a video.
-There's this error message that pops up every time I start or shut down my computer:
http://i822.photobucket.com/albums/zz141/Warlucith/errormessage.jpg
Something else that might be important (maybe causing overheating?): The screws for the HDs were connected to the HDs with thin plastic holders (presumably so that you don't lose the screws) and while I was unscrewing one of the screws, the plastic holder broke.
Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what the problem is, but it is really annoying and it's pretty much impossible to play the games I want to, as the computer just randomly stops working without warning. I called back Dell Tech Support, but they want to charge me another $150.
I'm not sure what to do now. Is there anything I can do to find out the problem? Can I just do another system wipe and start from scratch? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Nick
Wow I can't believe Dell tech support had a novice (sorry) try to open up their computer and fudge around with it? That seems a bit irresponsible on their part. I am assuming this is also a laptop, since you said it is too hot to run on your lap.
It sounds to me like your GPU fan may not be running, causing your GPU to overheat, leading to some graphics corruption (e.g., the pale green screen + crashing.) This could also be why your laptop has started to get too hot to leave on your lap.
The Microsoft .NET component error is likely due to a software issue (wrong software, or just a weird daemon bug) and can be fixed with an OS re-install most likely.. there are other ways to debug this but its a bit difficult to walk someone through it via message board.
The overheating however, is likely due to a dead fan.. or maybe you accidently disconnected something you shouldn't when you were fudging around in your laptop? I seriously doubt your HDD mount is causing so much heat to be generated.
Not sure if it would work, but I would call Dell and tell them the tech support guy had you messing around in your computer even though you didn't know what you were doing, and just ended up making problems worse. They should be obligated to come out and take a look and repair your laptop onsite, but I guess that would only be in a perfect world.
If that doesn't work, I would try to isolate the issue of where the heat is coming from. GPU being the obvious source IMO. If you figure that out, just do a clean system wipe and see what happens. Is this an SSD?