2.5 screens shown on laptop display even at BIOS boot time (Vista, GeForce Go 7600)

Question

I have been asked by a relative to have a look at her Fujitso Siemens Amarillo 32-bit Vista laptop, which recently started to act strangely. I do not have reliable information about the exact sequence of events which caused this.

When the machine is booted the display starts up in a "show the screen with a few missing pixels here and there, 2.5 times". Please see illustration from inside Windows runing Windows Update:

When running the nvidea driver, the machine blue screens at start up as the initialization timed out. Without the nvidea driver or in safe mode it comes up as expected. I do not right now have the opportunity to attach an external display.

My theory is that a driver update has left the GeForce GO 7600 graphics card in an incorrect state which the normal driver software does not expect and cannot handle so more "drastic means" are necessary but this is not something I normally do, so I would appreciate an evaluation of my theory, and perhaps even pointers to a suitable tool for fixing this. Again, this is not only in windows but straight from startup.

Suggestions on how to fix this?

Answer 1

Not terribly clear from your post what you mean "not only in windows but straight from startup", but if this appears in the BIOS screen at all it likely a issue with the hardware of some sort.

Possible things that can cause the symptoms:

• Bad motherboard
• Bad GPU
• Cable connecting display to motherboard is not seated properly or bad

If your system has been knocked about or dropped, gotten wet, or overheated for any reason it could cause the above.

If it is not occurring at the BIOS screen, the possible things to try before thinking it is a hardware issue would be:

• Remove your system's battery and disconnect it from power for 10 minutes.
• Reset BIOS to defaults
• Boot into Windows and use the System Restore feature to roll back the system to a date before you updated the video driver
• Try booting off of a Linux live CD or Windows PE disc to see if it is related to the Windows installation in any way.

Regarding your theory: all video cards have a BIOS ROM extension that runs before Windows starts. I've never heard of a driver update modifying this BIOS ROM, not to mention modifying it incorrectly. I don't even know if nVidia video cards have flashable BIOS ROM like PC's. While I think it is extremely unlikely and still would bet on hardware failure, you might try downgrading your video drivers or trying different ones and see what happens.