Friday, August 24, 2007

Dell Inspiron 1501 Locking Up Problem

I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 (Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core TK-53 1.7GHZ) running Windows Vista and I was having problems with the system freezing up once a day.

Suddenly, the Inspiron 1501 locks up with no response from the mouse and keyboard, etc. The desktop is gone, the screen becomes blank with vertical white stripes and a small square with red stripes. Pretty weird! This happens randomly, I could be just browsing the Web, reading emails, compiling in Visual Studio, or doing nothing.

After spending a few hours with the Dell Support dude on the phone, we run all the hardware tests and all passed. To run the tests, turn off your computer, then hold the Fn key and press the power button.

It turned out that the problem was the video driver. A new ATI IGP Xpress 1150 driver for Windows Vista was released on August 10, 2007. After installing it the problem was solved!!

It is just surprising that the Dell download pages says that this new driver version is an optional update, but my girlfriend had the same problem on her Inspiron 1501 which was solved with this video driver update. Anyone else experiencing this problem?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Yes I have the same problem and the driver update did not fix it.
Oh well I just have to deal with it since I bought it used.

Spring Boot Configuration Properties Localization

Spring Boot allows to externalize application configuration by using properties files or YAML files. Spring Profiles  provide a way to segr...