laptop display problems..

Hi there

So recently my laptop (Dell XPS M1330, Vista) started crashing, in the following way: display went weird, then it went to a black screen, then it (sometimes) switched off (if not, I had to switch it off as I couldn't see anything).

This eventually deteriotated into it just showing a black screen (nearly) everytime I switched it on (not even displaying the dell booting screen).

However in this case, if I use an external monitor, I can see the boot screen. From there, if I run Ubuntu or Windows safe mode it seemed stable (on the external monitor), but if I tried to run full Vista it would eventually crash again. Note that if I run safe mode and shut down properly (viewing using the external monitor), when I restart, the laptop display works fine (until I run full Vista again, anyway). However I need to have the proper shutdown to get the laptop display to work again.

Reinstalling the Geforce Nvidia 8400 display driver didn't help, but I have rolled back the Geforce Nvidia 8400 driver to the standard VGA adaptor, which improves matters a lot: this allows me to run full Vista properly without it crashing. However, this obviously means (no Vista Aero and) video quality is poor. Also the display now never switches off and last time I rebooted the black screen problem was back.

My questions are
(a) argh, what's going wrong?! - is this a driver or hardware problem, and how do I fix it?
(b) if it goes to the black screen when booting, is there anything I can do if I don't have an external monitor handy (other than blindly try to shut down and restart).

thanks

 

Interesting, not seen that - thanks.