Any software to find out if the Graphic card is damaged?
I am a translator!
Hi, I would like to know if it is possible to find out through software whether the graphic card is damaged. The thing is that the external monitor connected to the laptop displays with a greenish tone -not always, it comes and goes-. The graphic card is a Nvidia Geforce Go 6150 and I am using the Nouveau driver -in fact this problem has arised at about the same time I installed this driver, so I wonder if it might have damaged the card-. The problem is also observed running Windows Vista (about the same time Vista was updated to service pack 2?). It is not a problem of the laptop VGA connection since connecting the monitor to an expansion port does not solve the problem nor it is because of the monitor itself or the wire -I have tested with other monitor and wire-.
Thanks a lot.
I am a translator!
It's very unlikely that hardware can be damaged through firmware, let alone an external driver. I wouldn't rule it out completely, but I strongly doubt that software could have done this to your graphics card.
How old is the card? Is the warranty still effective? Perhaps you could get on technical support with NVidia and ask if this is a known issue for your graphics card.
I am a translator!
Thanks for your answer, AndrewT. The warranty is no longer effective -the laptop is more than two years old-. I will take it to a technician, however I wondered if there was some piece of software which could check and detect physical malfunctioning of the graphic card -whatever might have been the cause of the problem-. In any case, you mention firmware, do you think that the Vista update which took place at about the same time of installing Trisquel might perhaps have updated also the firmware in the graphic card and it could be causing this problem -perhaps reinstalling that firmware could help-?
Many thanks.
PS.- I wonder as well if there might be some sort of external graphic card (via USB or whatever) to be used on the laptop instead of the one it's got -I heard sometime ago that some company (not remember which one) was to produce that sort of device, but I have not heard of it any more.
I am a translator!
"Firmware" on a video card is usually limited to its internal BIOS that are needed to initialize the card, and these aren't normally updated. Needless to say, they are normally non-free. :)
USB 2.0 has a maximum transfer rate of 480 megabytes per second, compared to several gigabytes per second for PCI-e. Because that's far too slow to be useful for 3D acceleration, no USB solution for graphics has been possible. That may change as the new USB 3.0 standard is adopted by the computer hardware industry; USB 3.0 has a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 4.8 gigabytes per second. The Linux kernel already supports USB 3.0, unlike Windows 7 or Mac OS X, but it will be some time until hardware manufacturers have made the switch.
I would guess that the problem simply has to do with age, and the Vista update merely happened around the same time.
I am a translator!
A lot of interesting information. Thank you very much, AndrewT. As for the laptop I will take it to repair to see what is going on.