Graphics Related? Freezing issue on laptop

[Silvia_S14]

I have a Dell Latitude e6400 at work. It is a spare Laptop that we were using in our endoscopy labs. It runs win7. The problems started a few months ago with an annoying issue of "freezing up" after running anywhere from 30 min to 3-4 hours. I had our part time IT guy look at it, but he is all about networks, and not so much about hardware issues. He made some changes to the power management settings that seemed to help a little. It would sometimes run up to 6 hours after he adjusted it, but the freezing problem still remained. I ran CPU temp monitors, etc. No sign of overheating. In addition to this, about a month ago the display started randomly messing up. The screen would be pushed to the side, streaks of colours and flickering lines and text was unreadable. It would correct itself after a few minutes usually.
Just for fun, last week when i noticed the display issue occurring, I connected it to an external monitor, and the display looked just fine on it. This lead me to believe that the graphics card (Intel Integrated) was ok, and that the issue was related to either the cable, the inverter or the built in display. I hooked the computer up to an older xvga flat monitor (1024x768) and left it on. It was still running the next morning, and had not frozen up. In fact i left it running for 2 weeks and it still did not freeze. Since my main computer was a very old "potato" running xp with only 512MB RAM, I got permission to hook up an external monitor, keyboard and mouse to this laptop, since I had apparently "fixed" the issue. When I hooked it to the desktop monitor running at 1280x768, which is what the built in display was, I noticed that the freezing issue had returned. It didn't seem to matter whether the display was set to external monitor only or duplicate displays. I ended up hooking it back up to the smaller XVGA monitor, and it seems to be working again.



Any ideas what is possibly wrong with this unit? I would really like to use a larger monitor.

 

[viveknayyar007]

Hello Silvia_S14

It looks like there is some driver issue, if not that of hardware itself. Since you are using the laptop in your lab, it is unlikely that it is moved frequently and therefore the chances of hardware related problems are quite less.

Also, if connecting your laptop to the bigger display has shown some inconsistencies, the reason could be the limitation of the graphics card of your old computer. (Old graphics cards were unable to send displays to the high-resolution monitors.)

If you want to use a larger monitor, you may want to go for an external graphics card and then connect the big screen to it.

Hope this helps.