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KF6SNJ
Joined: 19 Jun 2007
Posts: 698
Location: Distressed States of Amerika
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 Posted: Fri 04 Jul 2008, 21:07 Post subject:
 Strange, now works, but why?
Subject description: Dell Inspiron 4000 Laptop |
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My pastor gave me a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop in which the monitor had apparently gone bad. There were odd lines jetting off from just about every graphic and letter. Basically, it was almost unreadable. I decided to look at the BIOS settings. It was set to run from LCD and not from an external monitor. I tried playing with the display settings, but that only seemed to make it worse. Finally, I did something I had not thought to ever do on any computer, I disabled COM1. Suddenly the display was crystal clear. The OS, WinME, complained about COM1 being disabled, but everything looked great. It was perfectly readable. I booted up MacPup on (using the IDE=NODMA option) and everything was absolutely perfect. Here is what I don't get:
How is it that disabling COM1 would cause the display to suddenly work correctly?
I already wrote to my pastor about it, of course he may now want his old laptop back, but if so, I don't mind. I thanked him for giving me the opportunity to fix this.
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WhoDo
Joined: 11 Jul 2006
Posts: 4441
Location: Lake Macquarie NSW Australia
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Posted: Sat 05 Jul 2008, 01:47 Post subject:
Re: Strange, now works, but why?
Subject description: Dell Inspiron 4000 Laptop |
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| KF6SNJ wrote: | | How is it that disabling COM1 would cause the display to suddenly work correctly? |
Shared memory address for the COM and Video drivers. Look at the address that COM1 is using, change it to another acceptable address and re-enable. Is the video still ok? Just a thought.
Cheers
_________________
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KF6SNJ
Joined: 19 Jun 2007
Posts: 698
Location: Distressed States of Amerika
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| Posted: Sat 05 Jul 2008, 23:28 Post subject:
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COM1 is supposed to be the serial port. I found that setting it to COM4 also works fine. My only other problem with it is that the "Fn" key isn't working right and I have to use it to type certain letters. Still, that is not too big of a hiccup overall.
Note: My pastor has told me I can keep the computer. He simply says congrats on fixing it.
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