Nvidia Quardo NVS 120m on Dell Latitude D820

[Guest]

I just installed the MSDN Windows Vista Ultimate. Thus far it has been an
awe inspiring experience.

However, I am having some graphics issues. The Graphics card seems to
chain IRQ's into oblivion basically reducing my system into an unusable
status for several minutes. Usually it recovers but sometimes it doesn't. I
can tell it's IRQ related because the mouse still moves but is very choppy,
and my sound card plays the last frame of music repetitively and slowly
iterates through it's frames until the screen becomes responsive again, then
windows informs me that my graphics card stopped responding.

Unfortunately, my graphics card does not seem to be detected by any of the
Nvidia Unified Drivers. It seems Dell has a proprietary graphics chipset
that Nvidia doesn't recognize, and my graphics driver revision is way out of
sync with Nvidia's. So I cannot update via Nvidia. It is listed as a driver
provided by Nividia though. The curren version is 7.14.10.9686. Trying to
manually update tells me that my Driver is already "up to date" and won't let
me install it.

Is there a possible fix for this or a fix in the near future? Any help or
insight you can provide is much appreciated.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

It's highly unlikely that those three components are using the same IRQ.
Have you tried checking msinfo32 for conflicts or sharing issues? The choppy
movement more likely means that something is typing up cpu cycles, and that
could be a driver issue.

It could also be that your system BIOS requires an update.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Guest]

I updated my bios as you suggested and it appears at this time that it
resolved my problem. Part of the bios update triggered a Hardware driver
update for my PCIe system port. I would have never guessed to update my bios
to fix a video issue.

Thanks a ton. If it starts freezing again I'll update but my current
tests seem very promising.

 

[Guest]

Unfortunately I encountered the grahpics freeze again. The situation seems
improved in that the graphics freeze doesn't happen as often, but it still
occurs in almost the exact same manner.

Unfortunately Dell has given me the "reimage your laptop with Windows XP"
middle finger, so driver/hardware support from them is not forthcoming.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi,

No, not really. If Dell isn't supporting the system under Vista, then you
may be stuck. You might check with the component manufacturers for updated
drivers rather than Dell.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Guest]

Quite irritating that Dell won't seem to sort the problem for you, or at
least offer some assistance. I'm also running a D820 with a quadro NVS 120M.
There is a workaround to the issue though, Live Search gave me a few trails
to follow and they lead to a modded inf driver that allows the NVidia Unified
Driver to install on the system.

Have a look at: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12185
They seem to have done a rather decent job, and everything seems to be
workig in Vista. Been running this driver on my D820 for the last week. At
very least this is a solution that works until DELL gets their act together.

Hope this helps.

Chad.