[Wylug-help] Laptop display problems - Radeon X600

[James Holden]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 03:40:27PM +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> I was asked to make a clean install of Windows XP and Mageia onto an
> elderly laptop.  All was going well until I did some serious updating.

Firmware updating of some sort?

> Mageia - after a full update, the display is lengthened to the point
> where the KDE panel is off-screen.  I'm getting round that for now by
> installing a second panel at the top.

Sounds like it's not detecting the screen properly. Is this the
internal LCD? Do you know the native resolution?

Can you post the output of running "xrandr" in a terminal?

The output of "lspci" would be useful too.

> Windows XP - was fine until I did the SP3 update.  Now the display is
> garbled, with all text dithered.  I tried restoring to before the
> update, but the display is the same.  Is it possible that the update has
> damaged the display card?  If necessary I'll go back to a clean install,
> but the need for updates will remain.  I know that XP without SP3 is not
> going to receive updates.

Hardware damage is very unlikely. Older ATI chipsets aren't
supported by the latest ATI proprietary drivers on Linux. The
same may be true for Windows.

> This laptop is to be a fall-back only, so I'm reluctant to spend too
> much time or money on it - it's already cost me over a day's work.  I
> did wonder whether replacing the display card was feasible, but I've
> never done that on a laptop.

Unlikely, I've never seen one as a separate card in a laptop.
It's all very tightly integrated.

> Thoughts?

Well... if it's a fall-back, I'd feel inclined to restore it
from the recovery partition if possible or put a bare-bones XP
install on it so it minimally works and ebay it. Save the cash
and buy a cheap laptop later down the line when you actually
need a fall-back.

James


> 
> Anne
> -- 
> Need KDE help?  Try
> http://userbase.kde.org or
> Http://forum.kde.org
> 



> _______________________________________________
> Wylug-help mailing list
> Wylug-help at wylug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/wylug-help


-- 
James Holden                     Developer, SEO, Technology Consultant
http://jamesholden.net/                          Leeds, United Kingdom
http://twitter.com/jamesholden                            07989 702968
PGP key fingerprint: 32C9 A76F 3CFE A06C 1B00 5AAB 9877 4742 8358 863A
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wylug-help/attachments/20111220/ce0b96b4/attachment.pgp>