A little trouble with colours...

I think my laptop's getting a bit senile.


First up, specs.

Inspiron 9400
T2600 @ 2.16GHz (2 CPUs)
2046MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 256MB

Right, so, it's been handling fairly simple things more slowly than usual of late - even has trouble starting firefox on occasion, and likes to hang when I'm trying to do things - like, text will show up a few seconds after I type it.

Anyway, I recently got Supreme Commander, and that's giving it some serious problems - ye olde blue screen of death, after (usually) not very long ingame. Though, once it survived an hour or so, I thought I'd resolved it (updating graphics drivers and so forth).

The technical blather in the BSOD says it's a 0x0000007f error, which seems to imply that my memory is shot...

Is there anything anyone knows of that can help?

Also, my battery's had it... lasts about a minute now.

Have I just run this thing into the ground, and should I lobby for a replacement? Though, it's only a year old, and the specs are still fairly competetive - so it should have plenty more use in it...

There are so many variables as to what could be causing your problems its not even funny. Have you tried the basic things, such as driver conflicts, viruses and things like that?

That laptop should run Supreme Commander just fine. I have a 9300 and I can run supreme commander on it alright.

If you think your memory is causing the problem, run memtest to check it out. If any errors get reported then your ram is the problem, if no errors then your ram is fine.

As for the battery... is your laptop still under warranty? If so, make Dell replace the battery.

IMO there is no need to replace your laptop. Worst comes to worst, reload the OS and that should fix any software problems.

Drivers all updated to the best of my ability - even went so far as to update my BIOS.

I think I may have had a virus a little while back, but I'm pretty sure I got it - been running antivirus programs since, and nothing comes up. I'm using PC Tools Antivirus (because I'm too much of a cheapskate to actually go out and buy any software). Ad-Aware gives me a clean bill too.

I downloaded a diagnostic utility from Dell, which seemed to show my memory as being fine...

Thing is, when I try to play the game, it runs alright - prefectly smoothly &c. right up until it just decides to freeze up and blue screen - fairly randomly at that - I have on occasion had it last half an hour to an hour before dying on me, I've also had it crash out when the ACU warps in at the beginning.

Looks like I may be formatting my HD sometime soon then, one of the only options I can think of that I haven't tried. Dreadfully tedious though, going to have to root around and find all my installation CDs. I don't even know where my XP disc is, and I'm still running OpenOffice because I lost my MS disc. Bah.

I don't think I'm under warranty - this thing's over a year old now, and besides, I'll have lost any associated paperwork anyway. So I suppose I'm just going to have to go on batteryless.

Downloaded some video drivers from here and everything seems to work now. Hurrah.