Dear forum,

                   Apologies for the vague title but that's literally the only way I can describe it at the moment. I also apologise if this is in the totally wrong place and if a thread can be moved then please do so to the right place.

First off, Laptop Specs:

Currently on a Studio 1558 laptop with the i7 core processor 4gig ram and the 5470  HD Radeon graphics bought in May this year. Ask me if theres anything more you need.

 

I'll start from the start but it's a bit of a yarn so stay with it if your big on solving problems like this.

Problem started(or so it would look like) when i foolishly(accidentally) followed a tinyurl link to a youtube video to where i experienced the first odd occurence. When the page loaded for the youtube video it played about 2-3 seconds of it and this would cause my laptop monitor to freeze, flicker once and finally turn off, baring in mind my laptop continues to run while this happens and consequently i have to restart. This then continued to happen everytime i loaded a youtube video, but only on the browser i was using at the time which was mozilla firefox. Windows explorer seemed to still play the youtube videos fine without crashing so i thought it was the version of firefox i had, so i uninstalled it which seemed to work. So after weeks and weeks of putting off upgraded i upgraded again to the latest mozilla firefox in hoping it was some bug that they had fixed but apparently not, and the problem returned. After talking with people at the time they suggested a system restore, which i did, and that did the same thing: cured the problem for a while but then when i upgraded again the problem yet again, returned. At this point i couldn't go further back in the system restore points, so assumed it would some how sort itself out but it wasn't showing any signs of disappearing. Evidence of this was that the same problem seemed to infect windows explorer, and then i found out that it would happen on pretty much any browser out there, chrome, opera the lot. so i was thinking, 2OK i could live without youtube" (as that was literally the only site that would make it do this), Then other things started to play up like, other tube sites that basically used the same flash for their video feeds. Even the adverts before, lets say, viewing a stickam live stream would make it crash, sometimes playing some video formats(sadly cannot remember which) would also make it do the exact same thing as the youtube would do. During the course of this happening to present, there has been some variations to the 'crash' that happened, and this was that when the laptop would freeze up and go blank, it would suddenly recover itself and an error message would appear in the lower right saying that my "display driver had malfunctioned and had been recovered". It also did this when i updated the Radeon driver and the flash drivers in mid progress of the installations (when it does its little tests with the computer).

Latest problem which have recently started, are that my USB ports seem to reject my webcam, and even plugging in the webcam into one of the ports causes the same youtube style crash to the laptop which took me completely by surprise. all usb ports still recognise external harddrives memory pens and the odd digital camera but it seems to totally dislike my Logitech C250 all of a sudden. So this is all very annoying and inconvenient. I've tried many times in uninstalled and reininstalling the USB ports, everytime i do it few and few seem to reinstall which i guess is a problem on its own too.

So thats basically wrapped it all up. The laptop has never once 'blue screen' error'd and the machine seems to work perfectly fine apart from this little snag. and literally tried EVERYTHING from updates to unistalling drivers etc etc

and to make matters worse my last resort was reformat and i managed to balls that up by talking to a friend and following some online guide, not the official dell walkthrough for some reason. which means i literally deleted EVERYTHING and by everything i mean EVERYTHING. completely empty laptop. So technically i cannot reset to factory settings which im still working on to find a remedy for because i managed to delete MacAcfee which i've got like a three year subscription too.

but then again thats a different problem on its own, point of the matter is, even a reformat DIDN'T solve the problem... so I'm officially stumped.

But yeah i have literrrrallyy tried everything, even teamviewed with alot of able bodied techies and they seem to assume its hardwear, but i bought this laptop back in may and already its playing up like this?! :(

 

but anyway, to go back to the start, whether this Tinyurl link i clicked WAS the problem or not, it has truly done some damage soemwhere despite nothing appearing in virus scans and disc errors.

 

 

Let me know what you guys think

W1n.