Screwed up Windows trying to fix negative color display

**Joe** · 08-12-08, 02:46 PM

Well someone had to do it and it was very easy. I've been reading this forum for several weeks in anticipation of getting my NC; making note of tips, tricks, and links to upgrades to make my netbook as up to date as possible. A few days after getting my blue one I decided to upgrade to new bios that I had found on this forum. That went without a hitch but a couple of boot-ups later, a problem with the color display appeared. The best I can explain it is if you remember looking at a processed 35mm exposed strip of film, the colors are a negative image. Don't know if that makes sense but the display looked like that.

I tried the samsung recovery but the problem persisted in 1 of 3 boot-ups. I then had the brilliant idea to re-install XP and that was the $$$ shot. Never having done one before, I thought I would be prompted with logical choices and it would simply be a matter of overwriting the existing OS with the new one. Big mistake. I created partitions, deleted partitions, went from a c: and d: drives to c and e: drives. At boot-up I was presented with a black and white screen to choose which Windows Xp Home Edition I wanted to run. I had 2 choices. The first choice booted to a newly installed XP and the other choice showed a configuration problem. So now I'm over my head with my week old sammy. All to fix a color problem. Pity isn't it? Taking it to a pro later this week.

**jez** · 08-12-08, 03:49 PM

Bah that's unfortunate. Do you think the problem was due to the BIOS? Or perhaps an unrelated fault? Contacting Samsung support would have been my first port of call before changing anything.

I hope your "pro" is able to sort it out for you. If it is a software fault he should be able to get it up and running again. Obviously if there is a hardware problem you might see the same thing again

Best of luck!

(For clarity the new BIOS is an official Samsung release and you would have downloaded it from their site!)

**TheRing** · 08-12-08, 05:17 PM

with regards to the xpinstall it would of been better to select a quick format before install this should of eradicated the dual boot option. although ive not seen many problems with the graphics chipset failing on intel so maybe a corrupt driver or a faulty unit at worse. Bios has been updated on many users nc10 here without a glitch. the unit didnt lose power during the bios upgrade (prob not as it would be a brick), if you reboot several times into the bios screen and leave it there for a while doese the colour problem replicate itself? if not then the chipset is fine and probably a driver issue. a format and reinstall will hopefully do it for you

**Richard T** · 08-12-08, 05:45 PM

You used the DVD's that came with the netbook yes?
As these would have drivers on the second cd(software one)
It sounds quite odd,i'd email samsung if i were you unless the techie is a lisenced samsung dealer/repairer he could void your warranty..

**Joe** · 09-12-08, 05:26 PM

Update. I had my IT gal sucessfully re-install XP and most of the samsung software. It's back to C and D partitions and the only app that did not install is the samsung recovery program. Apparently the samsung recovery area is no longer available after the xp install. It would be nice to get that back but not a priority just yet. The color display problem cleared up......until I got it home. It's still intermittent with the "yellow" screen at bootup. I wonder if I should attempt to remove the graphics driver and reinstall from the samsung site. The next question may sound stupid but I will ask anyway. If I do remove the driver will there still a display for me to navigate to the samsung site to download the driver. Thanks.

**WilliamYZF** · 09-12-08, 05:44 PM

If your IT gal reinstalled everything including the original driver, why not just go to the Samsung site and download the newer graphics driver. It will install over the existing one.

However, if it was working fine I am not sure if the reason goes a little deeper.

You could try reinstalling the newer Bios, it will reinstall as I inadvertantly did it when I downloaded all the updates upon arrival of my NC10.

If that doesn't help I would contact Samsung.

**Joe** · 09-12-08, 06:16 PM

Thanks William. I'll try reinstalling the bios and see if that clears it up. If not I'll reinstall the graphics driver. From my 'net searches, I found a posting with a similiar problem with a yellow screen. The fix was to remove the driver, reboot and allow windows to search for one. That apparently fixed it. Cheers

**WilliamYZF** · 09-12-08, 06:24 PM

[quote1228850662=Joe]
Thanks William. I'll try reinstalling the bios and see if that clears it up. If not I'll reinstall the graphics driver. From my 'net searches, I found a posting with a similiar problem with a yellow screen. The fix was to remove the driver, reboot and allow windows to search for one. That apparently fixed it. Cheers
[/quote1228850662]

Please let us know how it went.

**jez** · 09-12-08, 07:26 PM

Interesting to know someone else has had the same issue - yes please let us know how it goes it might be very useful for others who pass by here.

Good luck with the reinstall Joe.

**saurey** · 17-12-08, 07:30 PM

I nuked my Samsung Recovery Partition, and don't need it anyway. However when I re-install I think I will want to repartition entire drive. Samsung did some fishy stuff with the partition tables making them unusable in tools like Partition Magic. I want a 15GB system partition and a 145GB storage partition. Nice thing about the Sammy is there are 1, maybe 2 mandatory drivers for rebuilding: WLAN and/or LAN. Once you rebuild, and install these drivers from USB drive, you can download drivers from Samsung website.

I'll be taking this route when I move to XP Pro soon. I need an external DVD-Drive first though...