- May 19, 2011
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I have a customer I built a PC for ten years ago, and upgraded it sufficiently to handle Win10 last year. Very recently it developed an issue that the customer called me in for whereby it was failing to come out of sleep mode properly.
While I was investigating, I noticed a subtle problem on the screen, that window edges and a portion of the desktop had sparkling pixels (pixels that would momentarily deviate from their function to showing the wrong colour). The pixels weren't dead, and the sparkling pixels would disappear under certain circumstances, such as switching the default Win10 wallpaper (Windows logo, lots of gradient) to a solid colour.
After I confirmed (at least I was confident of it) that it wasn't a screen issue per se, I assumed it must be graphics corruptions, just very strangely occurring ones. In my experience, if a customer is having a serious problem and multiple weird symptoms, chances are they all relate to the main problem, rather than multiple independent serious issues. Initially based on the customer's description of the problem (how it wasn't coming out of sleep mode), I guessed that it was a PSU issue, but now as the machine has integrated graphics I was wondering whether it could be graphics hardware or RAM (though as the RAM had been replaced with entirely new RAM several months before and I had tested the hell out of it, I doubted this).
As I was unplugging the PC, I noticed that the DVI connector wasn't 100% plugged in
I screwed the connector in, booted back up, no more sparkly pixels It surprised me though how specific and minimal the problem was and its intermittency, I wouldn't have guessed at that being a solution.
I also found CRC errors being reported for the SSD, so I replaced the SATA cable. I have no idea whether that'll be the fix for the sleep resume issue, but it certainly was an odd set of circumstances overall.
While I was investigating, I noticed a subtle problem on the screen, that window edges and a portion of the desktop had sparkling pixels (pixels that would momentarily deviate from their function to showing the wrong colour). The pixels weren't dead, and the sparkling pixels would disappear under certain circumstances, such as switching the default Win10 wallpaper (Windows logo, lots of gradient) to a solid colour.
After I confirmed (at least I was confident of it) that it wasn't a screen issue per se, I assumed it must be graphics corruptions, just very strangely occurring ones. In my experience, if a customer is having a serious problem and multiple weird symptoms, chances are they all relate to the main problem, rather than multiple independent serious issues. Initially based on the customer's description of the problem (how it wasn't coming out of sleep mode), I guessed that it was a PSU issue, but now as the machine has integrated graphics I was wondering whether it could be graphics hardware or RAM (though as the RAM had been replaced with entirely new RAM several months before and I had tested the hell out of it, I doubted this).
As I was unplugging the PC, I noticed that the DVI connector wasn't 100% plugged in
I screwed the connector in, booted back up, no more sparkly pixels It surprised me though how specific and minimal the problem was and its intermittency, I wouldn't have guessed at that being a solution.I also found CRC errors being reported for the SSD, so I replaced the SATA cable. I have no idea whether that'll be the fix for the sleep resume issue, but it certainly was an odd set of circumstances overall.
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