Hey, you guys rock
 
I managed to attract the attention of a Dell employee on their forum and he gave me much the same information as you have Jon.
 
I've installed the driver he gave me a link to, and that failed to address the problem.
 
In the meantime I went to try a System Restore and noticed that Windows had automatically updated the NVIDIA driver, even though I have Updates set to notify me before downloading. This is exactly what happened to me before, not long after I got this Inspiron. Incidentally, that is exactly the reason I've turned automatic updating on the Inspiron since (and on the XPS).
 
Anyway, I did the restore back to a time well before the update, which failed. On rebooting I got a message screen advising that I needed to install NVIDIA drivers.
 
To cut a long story short, I undid the restore, still no joy so I did a full F8>Repair>Factory Reset. Once the process was finished and rebooted I got exactly the same message again telling me to install NVIDIA drivers I've since reinstalled the suggested driver and still no joy, my two DVI-D slots are still not working, just the VGA feed.
 
I'll see what the guy says over at Dell, but this is really starting to wind me up now
 
BTW, here's the Dell forum THREAD I started - you guys might be able to discern something from his reply that I've missed?
 

Jonbouy

alexoosthoek


Silly question: did you open up the computer?

I once "repaired" my neighbour's computer by removing all the dust from the video cards cooler.

Trouble is with that machine Alex is that the graphics are on-board there's nothing to fix, if it is a hardware fault it means an add-on card.
 
So hopefully it's just a driver issue.

Sorry Jon, it was just a off the shelf desktop thingy with Melenium(?) on it, now that I think about it: just the MB. Cleaned out the dust, still runs :)

Strummy have you tried a driver from nVidia download page. nVida drivers

Oh, I thought it was something else, now I see the problem, perhaps. Well, sometimes in the past Nvidia Drivers do not fully unload and if putting in new ones no matter how it is done, it gets messed up and what you need is "Drive Cleaner" or something like that and then install the drivers for your card once again making sure the old drivers are completely out. http://www.guru3d.com/ Here is a place that has so many drivers and different programs that you ought to find something that works. http://www.guru3d.com/files/index.html http://www.guru3d.com/con...3d-driver-sweeper.html Something like this, you will have to look around. http://www.guru3d.com/fil...videocard_drivers.html and you only need the drivers for your video card, not updated ones unless there was something wrong with the original ones made and they came out with a newer version. A driver that is compatible for your video card.

Or go to the Nvidia website and look up the archives there.

Thanks Grant and Alf.

I did a complete uninstall of the drivers in Device Manager prior to installing the new ones.

I'll try the NVIDIA website as you both suggest to see if I can find and install the drivers that worked for the best part of five years!

Maybe your source is mono but you're trying to display it in stereo?

(J/K!  I don't know what's causing the issue, so I'll just say good luck!)