A31p: Radeon 7800 Graphics Card dying? (warning, small pic)

[fongj]

Anybody have any insight on what's going on? I think my 4+ year old A31p (which I bought refurb'ed from IBM) might finally be dying.

Symptoms:

1) For the past few weeks, a light pink checkerboard would intermittantly show up on my screen, overlaying, but not obscuring the content. Moving the laptop around and applying pressure to different spots on the back of the laptop seemed to make this show up or go away. (pic attached to give you an idea of what it looked like).

2) A few days ago, I checked and say that the display tab of Dxdiag (Start->run->"dxdiag") only thinks my Radeon 7800 has 32mb of memory when it physically has 64mb. It hasn't always been like this.

3) For a brief while last night, full portions of my screen became fuzzy/distorted/garbage while I was previewing some jpgs (e.g. top third, bottom third, definetly not just corrupted jpg files.) I immediately shut down the laptop after this.

Today, there are no problems, and no pink checkerboard, but the computer still thinks the graphics card has only 32mb of memory.

Relevant details about my laptop:
A31p, 2653-XX9 (refurbished model based on 2653-H5U)
2gb of ram (the second gig was added a few months ago, but didn't directly cause the problems, as far as I can tell)
Mobility-modded Ati drivers: v8.205.0.0 (I've been using Mobility-modded drivers for at least the past two years without any problems)

Questions
1) Anybody have experience with any of these symptoms? Can confirm that graphics card is dying?
2) Graphics card is not included in the Hardware Maintenance Manual, thus its not really user-replaceable?
3) If I wanted to swap another one in anyway, what else other than Radeon 7500/7800 will work?
4) Any other insight?


On a happy note, though, I have an X60T on order. The "employee48hour" coupon to give 15% off came at the perfect time.

click on thumbnail to see the "pink checkerboard"

[ElbertR]

Questions
1) Anybody have experience with any of these symptoms? Can confirm that graphics card is dying?
2) Graphics card is not included in the Hardware Maintenance Manual, thus its not really user-replaceable?
3) If I wanted to swap another one in anyway, what else other than Radeon 7500/7800 will work?
4) Any other insight?

1) Common problem on A31P's. Video processor and/or memory is going bad.

2) It is integrated on the motherboard and not replaceable.

3) Nothing. The problem will return. You can try lowering the color resolution to 16M to reduce the screen corruption.

4) To fix it you need a new A31p systemboard. An A31 board won't work with your screen. Be careful with buying a used replacement from ebay, it might have the same problem. Look for part number 26P8430 or 26P8232.

[fongj]

Thanks for that info. Luckily its still running without problems now (minus the missing 32mb from the graphics card), and I finished up a big project yesterday morning wihout hassle. (multimedia project requiring Photoshop, Illustrator, 3-D modeling, to go into a 7-minute video, using Adobe After Effects, that took 90 minutes to render, but was successful... ::phew:: whips brow...). I'll keep using this machine until it dies, I guess.

Very cool to meet another A31p power-user too. I was almost ready to upgrade the CPU last month, but decided to put the money toward a new laptop instead. Other than that, I have similiar upgrades: 2gb ram, Nec-6650 DVD-burner, plus an Ultrabay 2nd HDD adapter with a 5400rpm 100gb to use a data drive / scratch disk. I don't do much over wifi (my home-network is still 100mb-ethernet, and the internet access is dialup), so I don't think I'll upgrade to wireless-G capabilities.

What do you use all the power of your A31p for? Have you run into any problems?

I really like that the A31p is a three-spindle laptop (few if any others out there can have two hard drive, and an optical drive, if I remember correctly from what someone said). I will miss having the exhorbitant hard drive capacity to archive files/projects/movies on my laptop when I get my X60T; after having a "laptop" that is 8-9 lbs for four years, though, I'm pretty sure I'll love the true portability.