Graphics headache - what is this?

Hi all

For the last 6 weeks I've been using a laptop during some interior decorating that lasted a lot longer than expected. I had moved the computer out of the room and went to set it back up today.

Everything initially seemed more or less fine (if perhaps a bit more sluggish than usual), but there were about 50 windows updates that it decided it should apply. I let these install and restarted to apply them.

The computer booted back up, updates were installed, and then once I logged in, the screen got all distorted - it would flicker every few seconds and then a different picture would appear, random shapes and at some points I could see a tiny image of my desktop, or a random image from my desktop - nothing was readable or usable. The mouse pointer however continued to work fine and show fine across the screen.

I rebooted, and when loading up, the screen with the blinking underscore ( _ ) was filled with u characters across part of the screen. The Windows 7 flag screen appeared fine. The login screen does not appear and I get some random red and white lines appearing

I was able to boot into safe mode at this point, and the desktop and login screens rendered fine. I uninstalled by ATI drivers and installed new ones. Rebooted, and no change.

I have an ASUS motherboard, and I loaded up the splashtop desktop - this appears fine!! No distortion and I was able to see the screen fine up to the 1440x900 resolution it seems to support.

At this point, I wasn't sure if it was a graphics card or software or what kind of problem. I downloaded ubuntu and burned the image to disk on my laptop. I started the computer back up, and on the screen where I select the boot device, there were random red lines and dots. I selected my dvd drive and ubuntu started loading. Again, funny characters during bootup and I couldn't see what was happening. The purple ubuntu loading screen did however appear (although it wasn't centered - it was half off the screen with a large blank black column at the left). It did finally start up, and a screen with distorted white, grey and colour lines appeared. Yet again however, the mouse point has appeared fine and can be moved across the screen without any problems.

I've taken out the graphics card, given it a quick clean, and reseated it (in case it got dislodged from moving computer in and out) but didn't make any difference.

I have two monitors, I have tried both on their own to see if that made any difference but same problems visible on each.

To summarise:
a) Distortions can be seen pre-bootup, specifically on my boot device select screen
b) My ASUS motherboard splash screen appears fine
c) My ASUS splashtop integrated linux environment works fine with no graphical issues
d) Windows is completely unusable in normal mode, although mouse pointer appears fine and undistorted
e) Windows safe mode works, Windows recovery mode also loads up with no visual glitches
f) Ubunut splash screen appeared fine (if part off screen), Ubuntu when loaded is distorted and unusuable.

Does anyone have any ideas? Do I need to replace my graphics card? Is it something else?

Specs:
ASUS X58 Board
Core i7 920 CPU
ASUS Radeon HD 4850
6GB DDR3
Several hard drives

Graphics card is dying. Probably a RAM chip.

Just had the same with a friends 8800GTS :(

Yep, just rma'd a 560gtx with pretty much identical symptoms.

Do you have onboard graphics? Try taking out your dedicated card and see if its boots properly, with no artifacts, to make sure it is the problem.

Incidentally, I had a 8800GT die on my recently (had two in SLI). As it was well out of warranty, I did some searching on the net and the suggestion was that the solder may have become dislodged/cracked with age. The suggested solution was to put it in the oven (!) at about 180 deg for 10 mins. This, amazingly, worked, and the card seems fine now - the only bad part was that the cooler attached has plastic parts to hold up the metal heatsink, and these promptly melted.

If its out of warranty give it a shot? :rolleyes: