Open Heart Surgery On A Dell Laptop

One of my coworkers has a Dell Inspiron E1705 Laptop. It started getting a lot of blue screens at random times and the blue screen kept saying something to the matter of "IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL_TO"...Yes, I love how the designers of Windows decided to include very cryptic error messages. It reminds me of the days when I was writing my own OS and it was late in the evening when all I could think about was going to watch Star Wars Episode 1 as it was opening day. So as a lazy shortcut, I just coded a generic catch all error message such that if anything went wrong it would display "Blah". It was sort of a way to poke fun of these useless blue screens.

Anyways, IRQ usually refers to some bad RAM so after running my favorite x86 RAM tester, Memtest86 and finding no errors, I eliminated the idea that the system RAM was faulty. My next thing was just reinstall windows since the OS itself or one of the many drivers it was using, could have been bad. No luck there. I was frustrated. After more troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to a faulty video card.

Reading on the internet, it seems that the GeForce Go 7900 that came with these laptops had a very high failure rate due to overheating issues and bad memory chips. The less superior ATI X1400 that also was available for this model had a better probability of survival so I looked really hard for this card on the interwebs. The challenge of the X1400 is that it is an old card since the E1705 laptop came out sometime in 2006. Fortunately, I found the card on some obscure website.

The next step was to painfully dismantle the laptop since unfortunately unlike desktops, there is more to it than opening your ATX case and unplugging the faulty video card.

First you have to pop open this rectangular piece of plastic that sits between the bottom of the LCD screen and the top of the keyboard. This was rather scary because I had to use a flat head screwdriver and pry the thing off. I can hear the tabs that held it down go snap crackle and pop. Apparently this was the way to do it since there was no screws holding it down. Next the keyboard came off as it was only held down by two screws hidden underneath the rectangular piece of plastic that I popped off.

The LCD screen came off next. All that was holding the LCD screen down were 4 screws and for some reason the wires from the motherboard to the wireless card went through the LCD screen. Therefore, I had to flip the laptop over and disconnect the wires that connected to the wireless card before completely removing the LCD screen.

With the LCD screen off, I could take off the top panel by unscrewing a bunch of screws on the top and also on the bottom of the laptop.

I took the old Nvidia card out and replaced it with the ATI card. I put everything back to normal and booted the computer up. Now everything works fine. I was lucky that Dell does not solder on their video cards like in most laptops. If this was the case, my friend would have had to buy a whole new computer.