A8H random freeze with strange graphics

Dear forum members. It feels stupid to write my first post about a problem, after being a forum lurker for long.

I bought an A8H in Sweden, about 3 months ago. I fell for the A8 since it is fairly compact and with a understated design. This particular lappy is a budget version in the A8 series, with a Celeron M 440 and 512 ram. I have a few issues about the fan and the screen, but my big problem is the random lock-ups.

The most common scenario is after spending some time surfing or listening to music, the graphics get weird, programs stop responding and error messages starts popping up. But since the graphics are strange I cannot read some of the errors. If I'm lucky I can reboot and the problem is solved for the moment, otherwise I have to do a hard power-off.

I haven't done anything strange with the software. Just converted to NTFS and made a few new partitions. I hope I can get your help to deal with this without formatting back to factorysettings-bloatware-FAT32, or to send it away for 2 weeks or so.

Below are pictures showing a few of the error messages I've seen. It seems to be related to the memory, but 512 mb and default xp page file shouldn't cause problems unless windows files are corrupt or the RAM is damaged right?

This is so hard to deal with, I believe I know a little about computers and I certainly use antivirus and firewall, so virus/malware shouldn't be the problem. I just cannot see if this is HW or SW related. Everything can be fine for hours, even days, and then all of a sudden the graphics start to disappear.

Very, very grateful for your help, I know that this isn't really a support forum but there are so many Asus users here, maybe there are more people with similar problems. Thank you.

 

Is there any chance you could uhhh...translate the errors into english?

 

Random errors... well, the way I see it, the things that can be at fault are, in the order of probability

1. RAM
2. Video RAM
3. Video hardware
4. (Serious) driver issues
5. Another problem that I have no idea what could be

To check for 1., use a program called memtest86+ . Google for it, download the ISO, burn to a CD, boot from the CD and let it do its thing.

To check for 2 / 3 / 4, I don't know any software, you need to do it manually. Try disabling graphics acceleration altogether (remove driver and run on 800x600 with software graphcis only for a while). Check if problems dissapear. If they do, then it's either the videocard hardware or the driver.

For 4., make sure first you are using only factory drivers, no modded drivers. If you do, then try switching to a set of new drivers, see if that fixes the probem. If you're using modded drivers, switch back to default.

Well, make these tests and come back to us.

 

Of course!

Pic 2 says "taskmgr.exe Program error. Program could not be initiated correctly (0xc000012d). Click OK to terminate the program."

Pic 3 is the ctrl-alt-del-screen, with options "Lock computer", "Log out", "Shut down" and "Cancel". Oh, and a purple cursor too.

Pic 5 says "winamp.exe Program error. Instruction on "0x00c2d633" refered to the memory on "0x00000000". The memory action could not be performed. Following error was returned: The memory could not be "read". Click OK to terminate the program."

To E.B.E.: Will try memtest as soon as I get home from work... Will also try disabling graphics acceleration, but the thing is that theses problems do not appear in a specific situation. They come randomly, so therefore I guess I'll just have to do what you say, switch to 800x600 and wait...but since I couldn't tell exactly when the problems should occur, how will I know if disabling graphics acc. solved it?

 

Hi! Just a quick follow-up. I ran Memtest86+ for over 4 hours, no errors. Does that mean I can rule out bad RAM as the cause of my random errors/freezes? I guess the Intel GMA950 relies on RAM as well for the graphics.
So since I get a lot of graphics-related errors, the graphics chip itself or the drivers could be damaged?

I need your help to say what to do next - Since the errors are totally random and often appears only after say 3-4 hours of working/browsing, I cannot really remove drivers and run in 800x600. I could, but I wouldn't know if it helps...