IVHOTEP

Mine did have the aw lights go on, the fans worked but nothing else. so when mobo dies perhaps its normal that some part of it has life

Sounds a lot like what happened to me. thread HELP an old Ranger new mobo.

Of course, it just wasn’t clear to me if he had done that. bios flashing is a place I never want to go

Hi there! !"but I changed from Legacy to UEFI" just switched? As I remember I had to do a disk format partition to GPT to reinstall windows so it can work in UEFI mode, could that be it?

Oh and for some reason not one instance of the Alienware command centre I have found on internet worked. Good thing I still had the original Alienware resources CD

So I am very sorry it took this long...was on vacation, then some other work...then vacation and some third works So where I left off, I went and modded the latest gpu driver to have it installed and it would hang and crash in the middle of instalation. bsod = PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA Did that a few times. When I did the diagnostics from bios it would crash at once, probably the display test, I think it goes first. Had an command prompt do the scan and it did report parts of the system it could not fix. So I did a clean windows install and to my surprise it came out good, 980m in device manager from the box, !??#, with some older driver, 388,13 version. How did it find that beats me but it works. Another thing I noticed, when restarting all those times, I went into bios and on the security page there is "service tag" line, which I saw before, but this time I noticed that it was highlighted and pressed enter. So it said "Enter service tag", which I did and now its my old tag. As I wrote earlier, I was under the impression that only the first time you go into bios after new motherboard install did one have an opportunity to enter that. The correct answer is: you get one chance to enter service tag, but not only on the first boot. So unlocked bios is again an option but I had no use of it before and I am not doing that again if all works fine like it is. Hope I closed this thread😁

Hi! In Device Manager it only says "Basic Microsoft Display Adapter", no error. it is a 120 Hz screen with possible issues, lines as I said. FnF5 does nothing as it should, 120hz display is on edp connector so it will not run on integrated graphics. bios boot is as it was when everything was fine, uefi, no legacy, fastboot...

obviously I need a GPU driver update but still wandering if I should do something else before that.

Well a big Helo to you all, especially all of you I remember from the late notebookreview. Special greetings to all of you that still may remember me=) and to whoever made the wise decision to make an archive. I am a bit older now and had other issues since so instead of going through all that archive I supposed to ask here. I just love this laptop, sure its old but for my purposes its still very good. I love the looks, the feels...all the others I ever saw were just meh, Ill pass.. Last time I had trouble with my Ranger was 2020, the amd card went so I got into the upgrade bonanza thing....980m, 120hz, unlocked BIOS, ram, heatsinks, liquid metal, pwm bypass switch, u3 mod cooler and God knows what else. Knowing I will eventually have to reconstruct my steps I always did some kind of backup files, photos and wrote down a few things but it never seems enough info. I just forget. All went quite well for 3 years, especially temps, ice cold under all the load I gave it. Then a year ago I noticed a thin vertical line almost in the right corner of the display. I have an matte N173HHE-G32 REV. C2 one. Then after a while I think another ones to the left and right far end, after some time another one. Then it BSODed. Crap I thought and went back to the 60hz display after updating gpu driver. Never touched the vbios or anything else since the card, 980m, was installed. That was all good untill two months ago I got powerdowns, freezes of sort and the thing was dead. I mean I have tried everything I knew and was able to remember and came to the conclusion the motherboard died. So I got a new one from USA, about 200 euros, seemed legit, looked good and really unused. Nice to be able to still source those, took a while since it arrived and I had time to mess with it but.. Put it all back and..voila!...it works! I was surprised that I did not have to reinstall windows. All was there except office license which I had to pay again. BIOS is A14. stock one I guess. All worked fine for a few weeks and then...strange display behavior, lines of all sorts and then black screen. 8 beeps. The display was dead. I put back the 120 Hz again and it works with only that first vertical line I noticed before. Now here's where I am puzzled...there is no more service TAG. I read somewhere that I had to write it in the bios the first time I powered it on but ofc I didn't. So that means no more unlocked BIOS!? No more PEG? But my display works in some weird mode? FnF5 gets me the message in the pic below. If it is SG dedicated card would fire up when under load? It doesnt. So I need to reinstall gpu drivers? HW info and bios recognize GForce card but device manager says Basic Microsoft Display Adapter. Now I don't know where to start, no more 60hz screen for backup and i am afraid I don't mess it up and lose my nerve. So any suggestions will be appreciated! Thanks!