Dear Friends, I have been using Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron for more than a year with fantastic results. It has been wonderful until a few days ago.
The screen started on a random freeze, freeze meaning nothing would work. Initially I thought it was do with Compiz, and disabled it. But the freezes continued. My dell came with an nVidia GPU, so I disabled the existing driver v 180 and regressed to v 177. This worked for a while and then the freeze again. So I disabled the graphics hardware drivers altogether. This was the only way I could continue using the laptop. Along the way, I discovered some interesting posts at dell direct forums detailing in particular about the problems with some nvidia cards. This was not specific to Dell but affected other laptops brands as well. The good thing was Dell was extending warranty by a minimum of one year for those with the failing nVidia GPU's. Sorry about that lengthy background, but this is where my doubts arise. There are a few salient observations I made: 1. Whenever a freeze happened, the laptop would not work even if I booted into the vista partition which came pre-installed. The garbled screen would show up. This strengthened my view that there was something wrong with the nVidia hardware as mentioned in the dell forums. 2. However the peculiar thing was that whenever I disabled the nVidia drivers (official versions 177 or 180 but unsupported). Ubuntu would work and so would vista. This was in contradiction to point 1 and was in favour of a problem with the nVidia drivers. 3. Whenever the freeze would occur, occasionally the dell bios boot up screen would be in a mess. Does this not mean that the problem arose even before the nvidia drivers came into action? I would have to boot up several times to be able to disable the nvidia drivers from the system settings. Note: Its possible that I was using ubuntu all the time, and only booting into vista to check out and therefore in terms of probability I was more likely to come across the random freeze when booting into ubuntu. 4. Before I end the post I discovered that new beta v 185 official nVidia drivers (official nvidia but unofficial ubuntu because they have not made it to the ubuntu repositories as yet) were available. I installed them and everything is running smooth(Keeping my fingers crossed). Obviously, I need to wait for a few more days before I can say everything is fine. The thousand dollar question is: Is this a hardware or software related issue? If it is hardware related I must get it replaced before time runs out. Secondly has anyone else with a dell laptop faced this problem. Orthodoc -- ubuntu-in mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-in
