Dell Laptop Vertical Lines

I have a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop that I have been using since I purchased it new in March 2005. I only bought a 1 year warranty which I can't say I necessarily regret, but this past March (2008), my system LCD began developing vertical lines. I mention the dates because even with a 3 year warranty, my LCD problem would not be covered. I know there are 4 year warranties, but computers are nearly disposable after 3 or 4 years.

Mine is still quite functional for daily computing tasks, but the hard drive and graphics card are starting to show their age. The GeForce Go 6800 Ultra is still viable for things like Half Life 2, but I am again to the point I was in 2005 when I purchased this laptop. Back in 2005, I was getting into Half Life 2 and Far Cry. My laptop at the time, a Gateway Tablet PC from early 2004, played each game roughly as slideshows even at 640x480. My desktop computer from about 2001 was worse and clocked something like 2fps on each game and rendering was pathetic since that system's video card was DirectX 7 or something sad like that. To make my decision to upgrade from my 1 year old Tablet PC easier was the fact that the hard drive died in that system while I was considering building a more powerful desktop. I replaced the hard drive and gave that system to my wife and bought the XPS Gen 2 that I am using now. It turned out that the $1500 system I was considering building was now available in a laptop that I purchased for about $2500. I thought it was cool to get that and portability for that price.

This system was great and it spoiled me. The screen is native 1920x1200 and I use it at that resolution for everything. Now I feel I have to have that resolution. Perhaps a 22" 1600x1050 LCD would be as good - maybe better with less eyestrain since text can be quite small on this system. Back then I could game competently at that resolution on this system. About a year ago, with "improvements" to Half Life 2 and related Hammer games, I had to reduce my resolution to 12XX x whatever to get passable frame rates when playing online. Gone were the days of 100fps at 1920x1200 like I sometimes saw in games that were the same generation as my system. The problem with upgrading is that almost nothing can run today's toughest (Crysis) similar to what this system used to run Far Cry back in its day. I will probably upgrade anyways eventually - probably before hardware catches up with Crysis. But, for know I am gaming on an Xbox 360 and just doing old and casual games on my Gen 2.

Anyways, back to the reason for this post. In March 2008, my Gen 2 system developed its first vertical line. I got my second line on March 28th and my first line changed color on March 29th. It has almost been "fun" watching my screen go down the crapper. That sounds stupid, but it helps justify my next computer! Got my third line May 15th and my forth line on June 7th. It started becoming fairly intrusive. The screen is still useable, but it's starting to get annoying. Now today, June 20th, I got another line and noticed that my first line is now 2 pixels wide and has changed colors yet again. I find the color changing interesting, but have learned that it is probably no reason to have hope for reversal of this problem. Interestingly, the vertical ines are not discernable on a white background like when Word or my browser are on the screen. The lines do knock out pixel-wide sections of text, though and goof up my nice desktop image and my title bars and task bar.

Today, I finally decided to check with Dell on this issue. As expected, their website was fairly useless and basically told me, "outta warranty, outta luck". So, I googled the problem with this string [+"XPS Gen 2" +screen +"vertical lines"]. Omit the brackets if you want to use this in Google. I got 153 hits and the first page is all the farther I had to go to get more information. The URL for the search results is http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2B%22XPS+Gen+2%22+%2Bscreen+%2B%22vertical+lines%22 . Most notable from my search is that if under warranty, Dell supposedly will replace your LCD if you have this problem. If you have it, don't waste time, get it fixed. The page, http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/06/19/17774.aspx , has more information that may be helpful. I looked at it and read through it, but did not go any further. I am not sure of Dell's responsiveness to issues such as this, but this may be a reasonable starting point for this type of problem.

Back to my tangent: I have been considering building a desktop system for the past year and a half. It's just fun to look at components and compare prices. I have been using laptops exclusively for 4 years and actually thought I may never mess with another desktop. But hard drive space has been cramped these 4 years and causes me to be very selective about what goes onto my systems. That's probably a good thing. I prefer to have all the software I own installed on my system, so limited hard drive space is a problem. At least I perceive it to be a limiting factor. Also, with an updated (higher megapixel) digital camera, an Archos 605 with a DVR base station and a hard drive based video camera, I'd like terrabytes of hard drive space rather than 100 or 200 GBs. I currently am limping along with my system's 80gig drive, an external 80gig and an external 250gig. I works but is kind of a pain.

So, I am back to considering desktop computers. Graphics are pretty competent in laptops (still or almost or kind of or something). With enough $$$$, you can even get 'em with pretty good SLI. Even so, I don't feel comfortable configuring a system that will barely run today's most demanding game (Crysis) at high resolutions (1600x1050 or better). I'm sure twin $695 GeForce Go 8800's will run everything and at least run Crysis at some resolution. But, $695 each?! Not to mention these systems are less svelt than my 8.5 lb. Gen 2 with a brick for a power supply. They will also surely cost $3k plus. Whereas, I could build an SLI desktop with dual 8800 GT's (pretty good) for about $1700. That is configured with 3 or 4 hard drives vs. the one or two in today's uber-laptop. So, you can see for what I am considering, the desktop may be the better option. The lure of portability is strong though. Which will win??? I do know that the screen issue is causing me to have doubt about another Dell system. It's not only that and I know they didn't even make the screen. But, they seem to have outgrown themselves. The systems are getting more interesting, but customer service is weird and I have a bad task in my mouth from the years of them advertising great prices on systems with anemic RAM configurations. BTW, this Gen 2 has 1GB of Ram.

Good luck if you have a vertical line problem and let me know your thoughts if you run across this blog and read through all of this.