Q: Anyways, I seem to have a problem with my ATI Radeon 9800 card that came with my Dell Dimension 4600. I bought the computer online dell.com last week and like many others have just received and installed it. The first thing I do is install and run 3dmark2003 and suddenly the whole program goes crazy – all the colors change randomly flash around, and bars of color continue to appear on and off of my screen.
Well, I stop and 3DMark am shocked to learn that now my entire computer graphics problem, namely that there are large purple-red vertical bars on top of my screen. Its like I went and painted my copmuter screen – the bars are completely static, and they ignore everything. Any window or taskbar or whatever appears beneath it. For this reason, it makes it extremely difficult to see that something is wrong. I also checked the Dell forums and found that many appear to have the same problem . do you think Dell has a bad batch of the Radeon 9800 Pro, or just the Dimension 4600 can not properly map (food or heating problems to treat)?
Talk a bad idea w / the Dimension 4600 .
What do I do? Ask a new video card or just ask for a different system? I trust it a bit cuz it could not even last 30 minutes without a problem and I do not really feel like wasting my time troubleshooting it myself. Anyone else with this problem?
Thanks for reading.
Best Answer: See the link below
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Re:what's with all the dell bashing all of a sudden…
i have 3 at home (4600/400sc), all working very nice. Their cases are way better then antec / chieftec.
tech support could be hard to deal with, but on pretty obvious problems like this, should be done with in one phone call. They will send someone to install a video card.
In the worst case, send it back (within 30 days), the DHL man shows up at your house to pick it up within 10 min of the scheduled time, very nice.
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Re:Originally posted by: guy
Originally posted by: guy
You got a Dell man!
oh well despite being a member here and reading all the bad crap about Dells and other premade CPUs you bought one =/
My condolences welcome to the land of horrible support, shoddy componants, and not being able to upgrade..
big mistake.. huge even.
even in home built, there such things as faulty components.
and u actually can upgrade almost everything in a dell
Pay no attention to guy. He has no idea what he's talking about. We've already gone through this.
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Re:Originally posted by: guy
You got a Dell man!
oh well despite being a member here and reading all the bad crap about Dells and other premade CPUs you bought one =/
My condolences welcome to the land of horrible support, shoddy componants, and not being able to upgrade..
big mistake.. huge even.
even in home built, there such things as faulty components.
and u actually can upgrade almost everything in a dell
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Re:Originally posted by: guy
[dell dude voice] Duuuude, you got screwwwwwwwed!
lol
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Re:[dell dude voice] Duuuude, you got screwwwwwwwed!
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Re:Call, B!tch, and moan. Are your best solution. If it doesn't pass memtest then it is the RAM.
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Re:Originally posted by: guy
You got a Dell man!
oh well despite being a member here and reading all the bad crap about Dells and other premade CPUs you bought one =/
My condolences welcome to the land of horrible support, shoddy componants, and not being able to upgrade..
big mistake.. huge even.
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Re:The ram passes the Dell Memory diagnostic tests though. Is it a sign of a faulty motherboard if memtest crashes?
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Re:If memtest doesn't work, your problems may lie in system memory!
Bad RAM = unstable computer. Period.
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Re:omg…I just called dell and was speaking to a technician about my problems…she hangs up on me by accident. Ahhhhhh
Re:true, by default there is no password. SO when you go into the BIOS look for Intrusion Detection and just disable it.
Re:Best thing to do is get on the phone with Dell tech support, tell them about your problems, and refuse to take anything less than a new card. They SHOULD send someone out to fix it, or more liekly ask you to send it back (thier cost) to be repaired.
Just so you know, Dells have a switch on the case that when opened, sets something in the BIOS letting them know the case has been opened. You might want to find it and try to reset it before you send anything back 
Re:Ahhhh, for some reason this computer can't even run memtest86 (bootable cd image, didn't purchase a floppy). When I reboot, it enters the memtest screen and just resets. I thought that it might've been a media compatibility issue but I even tried burning it twice. To make sure that nothing was wrong with the burns, I tested both cds in two different computers, one even being a Dell Dimension 8250 and they worked flawlessly. Has anyone heard of this problem before?
Those that have a dell dimension 4600, can you test a bootable cd image of memtest for me and see if it works? thanks!
PS thanks for all the people that are actually providing helpful information, rather than just bashing about my purchase.
Re:CVSin: So the guys asking for help…and you have to be lame. Figures Mr. IT guy.
I don't think any other computer vendors are any different. They all will want to question diagnosing a problem when it concerns new parts. It's the nature of the beast. If you sold something to someone and they say…it's broke….give me a new one…you think you would just say yes?
Sucks guy, I hope things get worked out for you. WHen you do get a replacement I too would start from scratch and reload the OS. Dell loads every bit of software bundled with it when they ship it out.
It would be great to load a clean os, then chipset drivers, Direct X9.0c and the Cats. You should be rockin and rollin!!
Good luck.
Re:Sigh, I spent approximately 5 good minutes typing up a detailed response of the probelm through email, explaining thoroughly how I believed the video card was defective and was positive that it was not a driver/software related issue….look at the response I got this morning.
Thank you for using Dell Esupport and Services.
Driver installation can cause such problems as you are facing right now.
Please uninstall the previous drivers and and reinstall the drivers from
the folowing link:
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/format.aspx?releaseid=R71889
Thank you for choosing Dell.
I thought this would be the fastest way to get a replacement card through Dell, as someone on the boards suggested to me, but apparently, they don't trust any of the diagnosing that I did myself. To confirm my suspicions, I swapped out the Radeon 9800 pro that came with my Dell with a Radeon 9800NP flashed with the Pro bios that is in my other rig and guess what…the graphic problems are solved.
Off to the phone I go…
Re:You got a Dell man!
oh well despite being a member here and reading all the bad crap about Dells and other premade CPUs you bought one =/
My condolences welcome to the land of horrible support, shoddy componants, and not being able to upgrade..
big mistake.. huge even.
Re:Father-in-law got a Dell. It's been a pain. Dell's tech support even gives up cause he's not very computer literate then I have to travel 70 miles to fix the damn thing. Next time I'm building him one myself just to get rid of all the crap the install with the OS.
The one I have here at work sucks also…. I don't know if they still do but it used to be that some of the hardware components were some OEM version that wasn't quite up to par with the retail version you would normally buy.
Re:Yea, i would say a bad video card, call up dell and really cause them alot of trouble. They should be testing their products before they ship them out. 30minutes is ridiculas for it to show signs of trouble already. I would either ask for a working replacement or a refund.
Re:Eww dell. I'd try reformatting, but 99% lodds are you got a bad video card. Time to call Dell
Re:Dell tech support would probally tell you to reinstall windows.
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