Packard Bell Problems!

Hey everybody, I have a packard bell easynote F7280 and it's useless. I'm far from computer illiterate but i'm stumped.

I have all the right bios, firmware and driver updates, but from day one the TV-Out port has never worked, on any TV, ever. The monitor out is fine though. The DVD-RW has also never burned a single CD or DVD, ever. It used to read both fine, but acted as if it had no ability to write whatsoever, despite the windows explorer dialogue which allows you to create a list of files to burn (implying that it is recognised as a writer). Then recently the video display has for some reason started displaying corrupted colours, such as bizarre green shading on video and icons, and the DVD drive suddenly, and without any warning at all, decided to refuse to recognise any optical media except audio CDs. Data CDs or DVDs are not accessible.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled all problem devices and updated any drivers I could, but Packard Bell provide no drivers or help for the DVD-RW or TV-Out individually (or at all).

Can somebody please help me? It's now totally incapable of doing the jobs for which it was purchased & I'm desperate!

(Oh, I'm using XP with all the relevant service packs and glitch fixes from Packard Bell)

Is this still under warranty?

TV out is very problematic on many machines

As to DVD/CD XP supplies all the drivers for these devices. To reload the drivers go to the Device Manager and uninstall the device then reboot. XP will reload the drivers.

Here is a link to other issues:

How to troubleshoot issues that occur when you write data to a CD-R or CD-RW optical disc in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;324129

How to Troubleshoot Issues with Reading CD, CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD Discs

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321641/en-us

Packard Bell site:

http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...&pn=PB08400001

http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...8400001&g=1400

Have you tried using the Recovery to restore the factory settings? It is not clear from Packard Bell what this process is but they have to have a Factory Reset Feature.

Yep, tried all that. Juiced everything I could out of packard bell. Warranty is not longer valid, was unused and in storage for most of the year so didn't notice the video out problem, but it never wrote DVDs & the other problems are recent. There doesn't seem to be any recovery facility on this laptop, although I'm aware that there should be. The packard bell help system is also missing, but I doubt it contained anything more useful than the ridiculously unhelpful windows troubleshooter.

("Is your computer turned on?

*Yes
*No

Sorry, you've encountered a problem the Windows Troubleshooter cannot solve.")