[ubuntu-in] Ubuntu, Dell inspiron and nVidia!

[Biswajit Dutta Baruah]

Dear Friends,

I have been using Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron for more than a year with 
fantastic results. It has been wonderful until a few days ago.

The screen started on a random freeze, freeze meaning nothing would 
work. Initially I thought it was do with Compiz, and disabled it. But 
the freezes continued. My dell came with an nVidia GPU, so I disabled 
the existing driver v 180 and regressed to v 177. This worked for a 
while and then the freeze again. So I disabled the graphics hardware 
drivers altogether. This was the only way I could continue using the laptop.

Along the way, I discovered some interesting posts at dell direct forums 
detailing in particular about the problems with some nvidia cards. This 
was not specific to Dell but affected other laptops brands as well. The 
good thing was Dell was extending warranty by a minimum of one year for 
those with the failing nVidia GPU's.

Sorry about that lengthy background, but this is where my doubts arise. 
There are a few salient observations I made:

1. Whenever a freeze happened, the laptop would not work even if I 
booted into the vista partition which came pre-installed. The garbled 
screen would show up. This strengthened my view  that there was 
something wrong with the nVidia hardware as mentioned in the dell forums.
2. However the peculiar thing was that whenever I disabled the nVidia 
drivers (official versions 177 or 180 but unsupported). Ubuntu would 
work and so would vista. This was in contradiction to point 1 and was in 
favour of a problem with the nVidia drivers.
3. Whenever the freeze would occur, occasionally the dell bios boot up 
screen would be in a mess. Does this not mean that the problem arose 
even before the nvidia drivers came into action? I would have to boot up 
several times to be able to disable the nvidia drivers from the system 
settings.
Note: Its possible that I was using ubuntu all the time, and only 
booting into vista to check out and therefore in terms of probability I 
was more likely to come across the random freeze when booting into ubuntu.
4. Before I end the post I discovered that new beta v 185 official 
nVidia drivers (official nvidia but unofficial ubuntu because they have 
not made it to the ubuntu repositories as yet) were available. I 
installed them and everything is running smooth(Keeping my fingers 
crossed). Obviously, I need to wait for a few more days before I can say 
everything is fine.

The thousand dollar question is: Is this a hardware or software related 
issue? If it is hardware related I must get it replaced before time runs 
out.
Secondly has anyone else with a dell laptop faced this problem.

Orthodoc