I had bought a Dell Inspiron 9400 Laptop some time ago. It was a good laptop with a Nvidia card in it. One day it started giving my fuzzy squares and lines all over the screen one day. I had no idea what was wrong due to it had worked find 30 minutes earlier before I went and had dinner.
Dell has a offer of $199 and they will repair the laptop no matter what unless it is a LCD or motherboard. I check video card prices and cheapest I could find to replace mine was $250-450. So I choose to try the dell offer. I sent the laptop in and about a month later I go the laptop back. I searched the box and it had no trace any of any documentation on what had been done. I booted it up and bang, still had the same issue. So to grab the phone I go. I talked with dell and they looked up the case # and said it was a motherboard issue. So I go ok, and I find a motherboard and give it a try. Guess what! Same issues still. So I gave up.
Couple months later, I found this thread on the internet about some people with the same laptop with the same issues I had. Someone had came up with the idea to strip the video card out of the laptop and remove the heat sink and bake the video card in the oven for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. I am like what, no way. I thought about it for days, and decided heck It can’t break any worse that it already is, so I tried.
So as I type this blog post on the laptop with a WORKING video card now….I am very pleased and absolutely AMAZED that it worked.
So what else did I learn. Well, first off, price of a new video card from Dell was $439 plus tax and shipping. Two that Dell didn’t want to repair my laptop with the expensive video card so they just lied to me thinking I would go away. It worked, but I will never buy another Dell….Since I have bought a new HP.
