Display card issue on T42? Strange behavior, messed up video

[noetus]

I have a T42, about 6 months old. Sometimes a very strange thing suddenly happens. The entire screen starts a single colour, or shows multiple flashing colours in different parts of the screen, with parts of open windows in parts of the screen. The desktop disappears entirely, and I can hardly seem to get any respons from the mouse or keyboard, though some response remains, so with a bit of a struggle I can shut down applications. When this happens, for example, part of the taskbar or tray might appear in the top left of the screen (my taskbar is in the usual place, bottom, with tray to the right), and parts of other open windows might appear anywhere, flashing, or there might be no parts of any open windows visible anywhere, just blocks of colour, some of it flashing. The only pattern I can find in this is that it tends to happen when I have a lot of programs running, and a lot of open windows on the desktop. I have a lot of processes running anyway; about 90 on a cold boot, and about 500MB of my 1.5GB Ram used before I start any applications. When it happens, I seem to have lost control of the machine, as it doesn't respond readily to keypresses or mouse inputs. However, sometimes I seem to manage to shut one or two programs down, and then things return to normal. Although even then, the desktop may be 'overwritten' with blocks of colour or bits of displays from windows that were previously open, and I have to do a 'refresh Desktop' to get things back to normal. Even then, it may start happening again once I start to open some new programs. Sometimes opening the display settings and setting it to 16 bit and back to 32 bit helps, sometimes the only thing to is to restart Windows. This is an intermittent problem, happens maybe 2-3 times a month (I use the machine every day), and I can't seem to provoke it or make it happen, so it is hard do demonstrate to someone, e.g. a technician.

I have no idea whether this is a software problem, e.g. with drivers, or a hardware issue. To be honest, I can live with it, since it doesn't happen very often (I haven't lost any data from it, for example, it's jsut an inconvenience to get the machine back to normal when it happens), but it would be nice to figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Another issue which may or may not be related is that I sometimes have problems getting a DVD player or Windows Media player to work smoothly. Sometimes I get just black and white pictures, sometimes a player won't play a file it's supposed to be able to play (I get a blank screen, or weird artifacts). I often use TV out to play to an ordinary TV which works as an extended Desktop (this is standard functionality on the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 drivers). When I do that and my DVD player or Windows Media Player or Realplayer is only playing in black and white (this afflicts all these players occasionally) then NO picture shows up on the TV extended desktop, it's just blank (though I still get audio). I have to get COLOUR on the video player and then it works fine on the TV extended Desktop. Sometimes I can get colour when at first it starts in black and white by restarting the player, or in the case of Realplayer, reloading the stream (eg BBC stream online).

Is this an issue anyone is familiar with, or has ideas about? Should I call IBM? Does this sound like a faulty card? It seems to me that this may be a problem with the physical video memory, or with the drivers somehow. A possibly related problem is that my programs crash fairly frequently with an error that they have mis-addressed memory. This onloy seems to happen with certain applications, e.g. Winamp, Vision Backup, some DOS applications, it never happens with other programs, notably Microsoft programs. It happens usually once or twice a day, and means I have to restart the program. Annoying, not fatal. Seems unrelated, but if it's a problem with video memory....

Any ideas? Please?

[petroleum]

Try to lift the machine and put pressure at the area of the touchpad and the mouse from underneath the machine, and press up towards the keyboard with your fingers. What happens?

Or remove the keyboard, wont void the warranty since it it as customer replacable unit, and once removed with the cable still attathed to the systemboard, press slightly on the ATI graphic chip and see what happens? Should the monitor flicker at this moment you should send the machine to the nearest repair centre for the machine to be serviced.

[Conmee]

I just sent my T42p (2373-GRU) in for repair for very similar problem. Screen would sometimes just blank out or the colors would fade or every other row of pixels would become distorted, sometimes just typing would cause the screen to black out, etc. I could press down on the keyboard/TrackPoint/buttons and get the screen to flicker. Getting the machine back on Monday. Repair depot indicated that motherboard and inverter card were replaced.

When I did manage to get the PC Doctor tools to run from the service partition, the graphics tests all passed, but under miscellaneous tests, the Digital Signature Module failed.

Anyhow, service was very quick. DHL picked it up on Wednesday, and repair center shipped it back out on Friday. Too bad I have to wait until Monday for delivery.

Daniel.

[noetus]

Conmee, I'm not sure this is the same problem as yours. The symptoms you were describing are a little different. I don't get an pixel distortion, or black-outs. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the physical display, it seems to be a problem prior in the system to that. Mainly the screen shows one big block of colour, with bits of open windows appearing and flashing very rapidly, and chunks of the taskbard appearing in random places. As I said in the post, if I can manage it, when I reset the display settings (change the resolution/colour depth and back again) that fixes it, and this to me does not indicate a hardware problem of the type you describe. Though maybe in the video card/motherboard. Sometimes mouse/keyboard response is so screwed up I can only reboot the machine, and that fixes the problem, too. Also, I cannot make the problem occur by bending or applying pressure to the machine as you both described, and when it has occurred, the machiine has been sitting at my desk for hours with no physical movement. Sometimes just closing down some programs fixes the problem, but what usually stops me doing that is not that it doesn't work, but that the machine becomes so unresponsive I can't do it. Finally, the problem doesn't occur very often, and also as I said in my original post, it tends to happen when I have a lot of windows open, which again doesn't seem to indicate the kinds of hardware issues you described. But maybe I'm wrong about that.

But I will take the advice and try to get IBM to service the machine.

[smugiri]

From the symptoms described, I can think of 2 possible causes:

- one possible cause could be underclocked video. If you use notebook control or some other program to underclock video, try turning this software off to see if the problem goes away.

- second possible cause is bad video RAM