I was playing a game on my Inspiron 1420 (Vista Home Basic, NVidia 8400M GS) when the screen suddenly froze and the image became distorted (hard to describe how it looked like). Then the screen blacked out and the computer stopped responding, so I pressed the power button to manually switch it off.

When I turned the laptop on again to see if I could figure out what went wrong, the lcd had nothing on display. Not even the Dell Bios screen prior to startup, just a black screen with a visible backlight (and I could hear the fans and the led lights were on). I switched it off again and let it rest, and after a couple or so more tries I was able to see the screen and log in to Windows. I did a search on my problem, updated the Bios (from A03 to A09) and restarted, thinking that my problem had already been solved.

But even after the Bios update, my screen would hang, some parts of it (like where the mouse icon is) would get pixellated/distorted, and the screen would go black, and I'd have to turn it off. Or, if I let it hang for a bit, the mouse icon will come back and the screen will load again, and a warning message would pop out saying that the display driver had failed but recovered. I updated the latest driver from support.dell.com but the laptop is still experiencing the same problem! It would hang at some point in use, then after manual switch off, plain black screen when turned on again, no Dell screen.

At this point I was no longer using the laptop for anything other than internet browsing (troubleshooting the problem). And I've tried every possible solution I've stumbled upon online (Bios update, driver update...). Almost everything short of dismantling the laptop and seeing what's inside, and nothing seems to work. I'm considering reformatting the hard drive or restoring the laptop to factory settings (if I can get past the black screen), but after seeing similar posts on this problem here I'm beginning to doubt if that would have any effect.

On my latest successful boot up, I tried system restore, so my driver got rolled back, but I'm not sure if the Bios was affected. And the screen still froze but thankfully the display driver 'recovered'. Same problem. So right now, I don't want to turn my laptop off for fear that I won't be as lucky getting the Dell screen to pop out and Windows to boot again, but it looks as if the sudden screen freeze problem will force me to turn it off anyway. So I'm making the most out of this and have already begun to back my files up elsewhere.

I'm really concerned since it hasn't even been a year since I got this laptop (got it in January 2008). Any advice or help as to what to do would be greatly appreciated.