So the main symptom is that I’m seeing double. On my laptop, I mean. Like this: double1.jpg, double2.jpg.

The other problem is that it most often will not boot into anything but safe mode. If I boot in something other than safe mode, it will blue screen during the process and give me that error I previously wrote about…

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error
*** The system has halted ***

In safe mode, I’m able to screw around with re/un/installing the graphics driver. I haven’t been able to get consistent results, but for the most part, none of them have worked. In a few occasions, I have actually been able to get the double-vision to go away and get a normal looking 640×480 resolution.

In a couple even more rare occasions, I have actually gotten the laptop back to an entirely normal state, with my original driver and resolution… only to have the screen go black after a few minutes of doing nothing (this might be coinciding with the moment of the screensaver going on or might not be… not sure) and be unresponsive… and upon restart, it’s back to seeing double.

Once I got it to do a narrow rainbow strip on startup … just this band on the leftish side of the screen. That was exciting.

Dell support sucks. I just want to send the sucker in and let a professional diagnose and handle the stupid thing, but they insist on making me sit with a guy whose first language clearly isn’t English and trying to get him to diagnose the problem remotely. Which is hilarious, cause he did a remote connect session with me and through that, he couldn’t actually SEE my double-vision problem … I had to send him the above-taken pictures.

It’s just annoying to not know what the problem is. Is it my drivers? The card itself? My RAM? What what what! AGGGHH.