Strange, now works, but why?

[KF6SNJ]

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.

[WhoDo]

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

[KF6SNJ]

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.