Sup guys, new addition to the list here. I've been using linux since the 2.0.30 days, and debian since hamm was popular. Almost tried to become a developer once but I couldn't find any interesting packages to manage, and I didn't really like the idea of getting 200+ emails a day from debian-devel :). Anyway some of that has changed, because I kinda like the idea of getting 40+ emails now when*ever* I check email. Oh yeah, more about me, I do a little php development over at http://e.themes.org. Great stuff. Been kinda inactive lately since I'm getting so loaded down at school and I have to get my grades up as high as I can so I can have a chance of getting accepted into certain colleges for next year.
My main purpose of this email is this. The laptop of question is my Dell Inspiron 3200. You may have read my response to the "Best Laptop" thread started here a few days ago, and noticed that I've had a few problems with the monitor. It started acting up many many moons ago (heh), and I've sent it in over a dozen times to the Dell factories to be fixed, but every single time it's come back it has either not been fixed or something else was wrong. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating, and I've been angry at Dell's tech support for awhile now. My next step is calling tech support again, talking to a supervisor, and just requesting an entire replacement due to defectiveness of parts, because I'm convinced that's the only way to fix it. What exactly is going wrong with it? Well, the only way I can describe it is like this... Say you have a certain television channel you don't actually receive on your TV, and your provider puts a descrambler on it. That's what my montior starts to look like sometimes. The screen gets all scrambled up, but you can still see through it to the desktop and everything else. Then other times the monitor will start to flash on and off, like the small pointy button that turns it off is being pressed repeatedly. A friend of mine at school told me that this happened to his old laptop, and that it's a certain small connector cable somewhere inside the laptop that's been affected by some unknown force. Probably heat. He also said that the only way to fix it is for the whole laptop to be replaced, just keeping the original hard drive. He did also tell me that there IS one way you can fix it in linux, and that's by setting the clock speed slower than it's fastest possible speed. It would fix the problem, but there would be a slower refresh rate. I have no idea how to "underclock" a laptop, much less actually open up the case and get inside. I don't really like the idea of doing that right yet though, because the thing is still under warranty and I don't really want to void it. Do you guys have any suggestions? Thanks, - webfreak [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://e.themes.org php developer
