Laptop screen goes beserk

[johnjohn320]

Hey everyone,

HP Pavilion Laptop screen goes nuts about 10-15 mins into use. It starts flashing white garbage everywhere, displaces things on the screen, and the computer becomes unusable. Forcing a reboot resets it, but again, only buys me about 15 minutes.

The best way I can think of to describe it is when you had an old Nintendo game where the cartridge got some dust in it in and needed to be blown into and then reinserted. Know what I mean?

Any suggestions?

 

[mrblotto]

Plug it into an external monitor. Does it do the same thing on it as well? This will be helpful for finding out whether it's the LCD itself or the sys board/overheating issue

 

[Ninjahedge]

Sounds like overheat or possibly some sort of sync issue....

I had a similar problem when playing games on one of my machines. I turned down the CPU OC and it worked fine after that.



Reading the title, I was wondering if it had murdered a family of 5.....

 

[CurseTheSky]

Sounds like the graphics card is ready to die, or it could be just overheating. As mrblotto suggested, plug it into an external monitor and see if the problem still occurs. If so, it's almost certainly the graphics card. If that's the case, you can try opening it up to blow out dust and even possibly reapplying thermal paste to the GPU, but it may be a lost cause.

It would also be helpful to know the model and specs on the laptop.

 

[corkyg]

HP Pavilion Laptop? Graphics card? Thermal paste? How do you do that to a chipset soldered to the mobo?

 

[postaled]

HP Pavilion Laptop? Graphics card? Thermal paste? How do you do that to a chipset soldered to the mobo?

Just because the GPU is soldered onto the motherboard doesn't mean that there is no heatsink used to cool it.

I know with Dells it was just an extension of the heatsink for the CPU, I'd assume that it would be similar with an HP.

I used new thermal paste on my cpu and gpu on my Dell D830 and it dropped my temps significantly.



Also to the OP make sure there isn't a big old dustball stopping airflow inside your laptop. They can get ugly real quickly inside depending on the environment.

 

[MadScientist]

As suggested first plug it into an external monitor, if its doing the same thing its the video chip on the MB and the MB has to be replaced.

HP laptops, especially the Pavillion dv9000 series are known to run extremely hot causing the video chip to fail. HP knew this and recalled them. My daughter's dv9200 missed the recall cutoff date by a few months. The video chip fried and I had to replace the MB. That was a PITA and I don't want to do it again.
The way it funnels heat from the cpu and video chip by heat pipes to a single heat sink sucks. I replaced the original thermal gunk on the chips with AS5.

The AS5 helped a bit but it still runs hot. I just ordered a laptop cooler for it.

 

[Lanyap]

HP Pavilion Laptop? Graphics card? Thermal paste? How do you do that to a chipset soldered to the mobo?

The CPU heatsink runs over the GPU in HP DV* models but there is a big gap over the GPU. HP used a thick soft spongy thermal pad that does not conduct the heat well. The fix is to replace the thermal sponge with a copper shim with thermal paste on both sides. The GPU also needs to be reflowed on the motherboard.

 

[CurseTheSky]

HP Pavilion Laptop? Graphics card? Thermal paste? How do you do that to a chipset soldered to the mobo?

All modern laptops generally have a heatsink / heatpipe assembly screwed down around the CPU and GPU to keep them cool. They use a thermal pad or paste to help transfer heat between the chip and the heatsink. Over time, the pad or paste becomes dry and cracks, causing overheating.

If you open the laptop up, remove the heatsink assembly, and reapply a new pad or paste, it will sometimes remedy video or other heat-related problems.