Stephenb

Am new to the board and saw this section: besides looking for THE 1987 22R-E Toyota Hilux/Pickup of my dreams, I like to build laptops. Buy two or three for parts and Bob's your uncle. Built Dell C400, D410s etc recently. Actually, I only build Dells! I also built the desktops in our house, about 10-15 in the last 5 years.

Recently bought a Dell laptop XPS M1330 series: very nice piece of hardware, but behaves like a fine tuned race horse. Yesterday, I watched a HD movie through HDMI Out and it froze on me. Why? It was connected to the HDMI port of the monitor which was connected to another PC through DVI port. When I pulled the DVI to the desktop, it happened: instant freeze ... no blue screen. Pull powercord and wait a couple of hours and the laptop starts as if nothing ever happened.

Are DVI and HDMI port connected internally in the monitor? They both are digital signals. Anybody might have an idea? I run Win7.

Stephen

SacRunner

Is that sarcasm? I'm missing something, are you saying that it behaves like crap even though it's good quality hardware?

Was the laptop connected directly to the monitor/TV or was there an extra PC in the middle for some reason?

A or B?

A:
[laptop] -DVI-> [DVI-HDMI converter] -HDMI-> [monitor/TV]

B:
[laptop] -DVI-> [2nd PC] -HDMI-> [monitor/TV]

Either way, it sounds like you don't have the correct video driver installed (either on the laptop, the 2nd PC or both) and b/c of that the CPU is trying to render all the video (which it's not optimized to do) rather than using the onboard GPU or graphics chip (which is optimized to render video graphics). An easy way to test/check is to try playing that same video again, hooked up the same way and open the TaskManager (CTRL-ALT-DEL or CTRL-SHIFT-ESC or right click on the taskbar and select the "TaskManager" option) and if the CPU utilization jumps to 100% for any of the CPU cores your CPU is likely trying to render the graphics.

Generally speaking, HDMI is an extension of DVI (physically/electrically) they just use separate connectors (which is why those DVI-HDMI converters can be so cheap, they just route the various signals from one side of the connector to the other). HDMI does have an expanded protocol, meaning that it supports extra commands or functions which allows for some use of a DRM type scheme that is used with some DVD/Blu-Ray players and TVs to make sure you're viewing a legitimate copy of a movie.

As for being connected internally in the monitor, if there are different source selections for the DVI and the HDMI (I'm assuming there is only one of each) then they are not (or should not be) connected internally.

If there is only one source selection for DVI/HDMI or there is no selection option at all, then there is a chance that they could be connected internally, but I would doubt it. What would happen if you were to play 2 different things and connect both the DVI and the HDMI cables; if they were connected internally they would interfere with each other and you would get a strange picture on the screen or worse, the signals could "fight" for control of the line and possibly damage each of the 2 players.

And, btw, I am completely confused by that description

Stephenb

The race horse comment was made in context with all software having to match the hardware for it to work perfectly. A race horse with a hiccup won't win you races, wouldit! I used the latest drivers but the laptop is only certified for Vista which I actually haven't tried. Most of the Vista drivers for this particular model don't seem to work in Win7, but they do in XP.

My hardware connections were as follows (my monitor has separate VGA, DVI and HDMI input):

PC1 DVI OUT -> DVI IN (monitor)
Laptop HDMI OUT -> HDMI IN (monitor)

Both Win7 SP1 and WinXP SP3 installed successfully at some point. And suffered weird display at another.

I have investigated further and I am sure that I am suffering from the dreaded NVidia graphic chip problem that surfaced 2007/2008: blue screens, white screens, colored lines, freezes ... all the symptoms I have. It obviously had nothing to do with what I did.

Now the laptop won't start without any form of graphical distortion even during startup (when no drivers are active) any more. The problem has deteriorated. I have pulled the power cord, removed the battery to see if it recovers. But I don't hold my breath. Looks like a new motherboard to me.


Thanks for your tips and comments. It confirmed my suspicion but it seems to be hardware not software related. Thanks for asking those questions and running me through it again. At least I am sure what the problem is.

Stephen