My question is below comment #7 (my rant)
The backstory:
My son was playing minecraft last week and attempted to alt-tab to the desktop. He was greeted with a blueish gray screen with a series of evenly spaced black vertical lines running through the screen. At this point my only option was to hard-reset the machine. After the restart I got nothing but a black screen on start (real black, like no video signal). I want to say you always see the initial windows 7 loading screen, but at the point where it switches to the log-in screen it goes black. Oddly enough I read someone else had the same issue happen from an alt-tab. I mean, really? What the hell could that be doing!? Anyway, I've poked around the forums and tried all the standard suggestions. Here are notes.
0. This is for an ATI 6990m
1. Originally I thought maybe the video driver was corrupt. I tried reinstalling the drivers, but the installer would hang both when attempting an uninstall or when just attempting to skip the uninstall (which is what I original did).
2. I could boot to the machine in safe-mode.
2.2 I tried hooking up to an external monitor via the hdmi.
3. I did a fresh reinstall of the OS. I installed all my drivers except the video drivers. The card appeared in the device manager with a yellow exclamation mark (as you would expect). I created a restore point and installed the drivers. This brought me back to the black screen on start. Reverting to my restore point lets me get back to my computer.
4. The graphics card shows up in my bios along with the integrated graphics card.
5. PEG or SG settings don't make a difference. This makes sense since the ATI card is used in both instances.
6. I reviewed all the help docs found from this site.
7. (Rant) I'm a fairly calm guy, so I'll say I'm really annoyed, as anyone would be who feels like they've been robbed. I know I'm being a little dramatic, but this is pretty ridiculous. I bought this machine in Oct of 2011. I started having over-heat issues with the CPU that following June, which sadly I didn't contact Dell about until the warranty had expired. A laptop stand with fans solved that issue until the following Oct. $230 later it turns out the heat-sink just needed to be reseated. I had the option to buy an extended warranty at that time, but why would I? I spent nearly 2k on this in the first place and my expectation was that I shouldn't have multiple hardware problems in two years! I'm not interested in sending any more money on this machine, I have a desktop that needs replaced and I'd rather get that fixed than this. It should also be noted that until this happened I was honing in on an alienware aurora. I'm past the point in my life where building machines sounds interesting and I was planning on buying my first pre-build machine in over a decade. However, now I realize paying a premium price for some hardware doesn't mean I'm getting anything anymore trouble-free than building it myself.
My current thinking is that I might as well use this as a crippled laptop rather than not at all. However, I can't find drivers for the integrated graphics card! From what I'm reading it sounds like it's packaged in with the ATI drivers. The website does have some drivers listed for the Intel card, but it sounds like it's only if I have an nvidia card. Could I pop the dedicated card out and install the ones for the nvidia drivers anyway? There must be a way to salvage this.
Ok, one last rant. People buy these machines for their graphic cards. It's the assumption that the users are going to put some heavy gaming hours into these machines, yet I can guarantee this machine is lightly used compared to others. I purchased this machine mainly for using with 3D applications and not as my main machine. How quickly would this have failed had I really taxed it?