Serious Display Driver Problem

Hi!


First of all thanks in advance for any assistance you might provide.


I'm growing really desperate with this.


In April I've purchased a Dell XPS 13, i7, intel HD5500, touch-screen ultrabook, with Windows 8.1 Pro - OEM version.


For about a month I had no issues at all, installed some programs and games, played them as normal, graphical performance seemed really good. Windows updated as normal.


In May, while playing Civ 5, I started getting the dreaded "Video Display Driver stopped working and has recovered error", which exited the game.


Searched the internet, went to the Dell website, autodetected my pc and installed latest graphic drivers, but also chipset and bios, the whole thing.


Things got worse, not better. The error started showing up a lot more frequently and sometimes the screen froze, went blank intermittent with pixelized multicolored and polygon-filled screens. This started happening also on the log in screen, to the point that I could no longer enter Windows at all. Blue Screens started to show up a lot with the VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE (igdkmd64.sys). I performed several hardware tests via Bios Diagnostics and other similar software, all OK. Virus check: OK. I read that this type of problem only usually occurs when playing videos or other graphic intensive software...to me it happens everywhere and all the time when not under the basic windows driver!












I decided to try to recover back windows. Did not work. Only thing that worked was entering safe mode, uninstalling the display driver and reverting it back to the 2006 basic windows one. That was the only way I could normally load Windows without any glitches. This would be fine by me, except games got a lot slower and performance suffered a lot. This is no way to operate this kind of machine...


So I tried to reset windows altogether using a media generated USB pen and same OEM activation key. Problem: When reinstalling Windows, it presents the same problem. The driver it comes with (although a different version of the one on the Dell site) also makes the screen unstable and unusable. Safe-mode is the only way to uninstall and roll-back to the basic driver.


I've also tried CCleaner, putting the power profile to maximum performance, everything but tamper with registry and voltages. For extreme and risky stuff I prefer to activate the warranty.


I've been speaking to Dell support but besides telling me it's a driver issue, all they've done so far is suggest different versions of the display driver (slightly older than the current one), which simply provide the same result.


I could go on using the basic windows display driver from 2006, but I'm immensely frustrated by having purchased this expensive ultrabook just to see it drag it's feet.


What can have gone wrong that not even a clean install got rid of this problem??


Please...help!
 
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