Unable to startup, artifacting screen, BSOD

Cephas

Posts: 116   +0
So, a while ago my lappy was giving me "Display driver AMD stopped responding and has successfully recovered" every time I stressed it too much. This was always followed with a 10 second freeze followed by the crashing of any graphics-intensive programs and sometimes even a BSOD.

Through help on this and another site I ruled out overheating or a faulty driver being the cause, but whilst I was still looking for a solution, lappy suffered a particularly dramatic BSOD with lots of loud noise and pixellation. Since then, this happens every time she starts up. If I try to start normally, these 4 stages will loop continuously, though I can start up in safe mode but the unbearable artifacting pervades past the boot and makes it difficult to do much.

This happened a few months and getting discouraged I gave up, but I now want to solve this problem once and for all, even if that means I have to bin the old girl. I'm not great with computers, but I suspect it's a GPU failure, in which case I have no idea what to do. Either way, it would be good to get some of your opinions which undoubtedly are gotta more educated than mine.

Cheers
 
There was an ongoing problem with nVidia graphics chips namely the 8400 and 8600 series fitted to many laptops. It related to the solder used and also many of the chips themselves were defective. Reflows can give a temporary fix but to replace the chip with an updated one is expensive because you have to completely dismantle the laptop and the work on the motherboard requires specialised equipment. I've not read anything about problems with AMD graphics chips but they can presumably fail too. Replacing the laptop may be the easiest solution. If it's noisy could there be an intermittent problem with the cooling fan? Cleaning them out occasionally is a good idea.
 
Yeah, it uses ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 I think.

You're almost certainly right about replacing the laptop, thought it was worth checking out though,

I ran some speedtests before it died and the fans seemed to be working consistently/keeping things cool enough. Even so, I was using an external cooling fan long before that considering it couldn't do anything too intense without overheating.
 
Back