There is a widespread issue where M1330's with 8400M discrete graphics could be overheating as a result of the M1330's cooling design/solution that results in system freezes, blank screens and crazy artifacts on your screen.
I'm one of it's recent victims, and wanted to share this as I have recommended the M1330 on many occasions and I know there are several owners here. The issue starts to show it's ugly head within 3-6 months, and there are multiple waves.
Wave 1: An nvlddmkm error: "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, but has successfully recovered". This is not so serious because your display will flash for a second and continue to work normally. Chances are your XPS will be dead in a week or two from the time you see this error.
Wave 2: System freeze time. You'd be working and then bam, everything is stuck. No reboots though. You'd have to turn it off manually. When you reboot, you'll see colored vertical lines slowly appearing on your screen. If audio was not muted before the crash, you'll even hear Vista booting but you can't see schit. During this time, I was able to hook the XPS up via HDMI to my TV and start backing up data.
Wave 3: No friggin' display or boot. While backing up my data, I ran into some trouble again and Vista wouldn't boot normally. The lines had gone away and all I'd get was a blank/black screen. HDMI was still working but I could only boot into Safe Mode, and there were major artifacts/missing textures on screen. I was able to complete data backup this time however.
At first, I thought the display was acting up but this issue is happening to people with CCFL and WLED screens, and besides, running LCD BIST will tell you whether your screen is farked or not. Dell has been replacing the board + gpu and this has solved most of the issues reported by others.
If you experience any of these issues, don't wait, call Dell immediately and they will probably replace your board + GPU. Until Dell acknowledges this problem and confirms they will fix it in future XPS notebooks, I wouldn't recommend an XPS M1330 with nVIDIA graphics.
I'm one of it's recent victims, and wanted to share this as I have recommended the M1330 on many occasions and I know there are several owners here. The issue starts to show it's ugly head within 3-6 months, and there are multiple waves.
Wave 1: An nvlddmkm error: "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding, but has successfully recovered". This is not so serious because your display will flash for a second and continue to work normally. Chances are your XPS will be dead in a week or two from the time you see this error.
Wave 2: System freeze time. You'd be working and then bam, everything is stuck. No reboots though. You'd have to turn it off manually. When you reboot, you'll see colored vertical lines slowly appearing on your screen. If audio was not muted before the crash, you'll even hear Vista booting but you can't see schit. During this time, I was able to hook the XPS up via HDMI to my TV and start backing up data.
Wave 3: No friggin' display or boot. While backing up my data, I ran into some trouble again and Vista wouldn't boot normally. The lines had gone away and all I'd get was a blank/black screen. HDMI was still working but I could only boot into Safe Mode, and there were major artifacts/missing textures on screen. I was able to complete data backup this time however.
At first, I thought the display was acting up but this issue is happening to people with CCFL and WLED screens, and besides, running LCD BIST will tell you whether your screen is farked or not. Dell has been replacing the board + gpu and this has solved most of the issues reported by others.
If you experience any of these issues, don't wait, call Dell immediately and they will probably replace your board + GPU. Until Dell acknowledges this problem and confirms they will fix it in future XPS notebooks, I wouldn't recommend an XPS M1330 with nVIDIA graphics.
