TL;DR: When I start up my m17x-r4 the lights of the laptop switch on, but the screen stays blank, nothing seems to be loading and this all came after disabling the integrated graphics through Fn+F7.
Five days ago, I had an Alienware m17x-r4 (with a Radeon 7970m) with an Ubuntu 14.04 partition and a Windows 7 Ultimate partition, both working without problem. After a nightmarish chain of events that I'm still unable to understand, now I have the same laptop whose only functionality is to light the keyboard lights and nothing else. I'll go through the details fast, since my only concern right now is to know whether to send the computer straight to Dell or what. (you can skip the following paragraph)
Five days ago I was installing a video game in the Windows partition, when the computer freezed with an unbearable looping sound. After that Windows was unable to boot or to repair itself, so I started to use Ubuntu while deciding what to do. Out of nowhere, Ubuntu decided to give me yet another critical error, forcing me to reinstall that OS too. For the last five days I have installed at least four times each of the OSs for different reasons, while moving the many GBs of data I had in each of them from one OS to the other and even having to use data recovery tools at some point. Finally, I managed to stabilize both OSs with all the updates and all the drivers seemingly properly installed. There was only one problem, Windows was giving me poor performance on video games. In the previous Windows installation, an AMD program would ask me programwise the performance I wanted, but in this fresh installation this functionality was gone, and every program was executed with lower-than-optimal performance. This prompted me to tinker around with the integrated-discrete graphics configuration of my laptop.
I tried various things, like uninstalling and reinstalling drivers and things like that, until I discovered that Fn+F7 would disable the integrated graphics card. When I did this, the games would perform much better, so I hoped this could be a temporary solution. The problem is that it was very unstable and the screen would freeze within 2-3 minutes of starting up Windows. Sometimes the screen would freeze as soon as Windows was booted. Luckily, I had enough time to press Fn+F7 again and go back to the previous configuration, with the integrated card working, both cards appearing in the device manager, with their drivers installed. But when I tried Fn+F7 again the instabilities increased to the point that Windows would not even start up leaving me without an option to revert the situation. I tried to reinstall drivers in Safe Mode and pressing Fn+F7, but Safe Mode does not allow for any of those functionalities. I uninstalled all graphics drivers and tried to start Windows again, but it was very unstable, practically unusable from start. I managed to reinstall Radeon drivers, but the screen was already tearing very badly. Finally, when powering up the laptop, the first splash screen would load, but two big green vertical lines would tear through the screen and the computer was not able to enter the boot loader any more. After two more shut downs and starting ups, the screen simply would stop reacting and that is the situation I'm in, right now. The lights of the laptop light, but the screen does not and it does not seem to load anything.
I assume this means sending it to Dell, but maybe there is something I can still do by myself (maybe opening the laptop and re-seating the graphics card?).
Thanks in advance.