Problem Laptop corrupt graphics

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Hi,

A few days ago my laptop froze a few minutes after Windows Vista loaded and the graphics went corrupt. The graphic output on screen is garbled. It looked like it may be bad ram so I tried it with one SO-DIMM at a time. No dice so I suspected the video RAM. It has a built in ATI Radeon 3200 with 256Mb Video RAM but as I can only get it to be stable in safe mode, the video RAM burn-in test software won't work due to the low res. On one of the many reboots the CMOS advised me to check the date and time settings. I did so and they had defaulted back to factory settings. I changed them to the correct date and time and Windows booted and remained stable. In light of this, I changed the CMOS battery but it just did the same thing on first boot after. Any ideas? I've included a shot from my phone of the sort of corruption I'm talking about. It froze on the shut down screen.

Thanks & Regards,

Ant

 

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It looks like it is set to a resolution the screen does not support. Try going into safe mode and changing it to the native resolution of the screen.

 

Safe mode only allows me 800x600 and nothing else. It also froze loads of times on booting from the Vista CD and selecting startup repair. Took me 10 or so goes to get it to work. I'll try looking at display settings but it probs won't give me long enough to change things before it crashes.

Thanks,

Ant

 

I had the same problem on a Dell laptop.

In the end I had to phone their support people.
Turned out to be a fried graphics chip and they sent someone out to swap the board.
The guy said he'd done hundreds of them.

Have you tried connecting the laptop to an external monitor or TV to see what happens?

 

You could also try sticking a different hard disk in there and putting a fresh install on just to rule out any existing software issues. Depends on if you have a spare hdd or not though.

 

Hi,

I've got a new HD on the way. Should be here in a few days and then I can do a fresh install. It's a pain with it not being stable enough to run the video RAM burn-in test. I can get a new ATI Mobility 3470 PCI-E card to replace it but I don't want to fork out £70 in case it's not that.

Cheers for all the replies,

Anthony