What does it mean when the screen goes all scrambled?

So I was using my laptop today, just got it out of hibernation and after like a minute the screen went all scrambled and it froze up.

I thought it was something due to hibernation, so I restarted it and all went well then the screen went scrambled again and froze.

Turned it off again and restarted it, this time I got a little hint of scramble at the Windows login screen, but it hasn't scrambled yet.

I haven't done anything, installed anything, messed with drivers, absolutely nothing. I have been using the laptop fine for the past month(since I went to x64 Vista) with absolutely no problems.

It worked fine yesterday, then today I get a scramble. Hopefully it is just a byproduct of hibernation, but I'm just curious if this has happened to anyone else.

 

The only time I have seen scrambling (i.e. odd colored pixels randomly scattered here and there) is when my video card was overheating. This occurred on my overclocked desktop machine. I hope this is not the case with your notebook.

Jeremy

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Yep, sounds to me like the ATI card is overheating. If you could take a picture of the scramble it would definitely help identify the problem.

If this continues, I suggest contacting your ASUS reseller or your local ASUS support center about your problems.

 

Maybe it's overheating. Check the airpathes on your laptop. See if the vent is putting out the normal amount of air and if it's hot or not.

Or maybe the heatsink isn't making too contact with the GPU anymore or isn't making good contact in the system. Might happen with enough bumps and such.

Was this system modded? Any special heatsink paste?

 

Also, have a go at the video driver, try installing the latest version. Also upgrade the BIOS. After you did those, we should start looking for other solutions. As some members noted, the problem might be from the GPU overheating.

 

If it scrambles again, you might try hooking the laptop to an external monitor, that way you can determine if the problem could be with the actual LCD. I'd tend to agree with the others that it's something to do with the GPU itself, but it can't hurt to rule out the LCD. If the scrambling appears on both, that would be further evidence for it being the video card.

 

But would it be an over heating problem if he's coming out of "hibernation" when it seems to me everything would be cooled down ?

 

Once I got home and hooked it up to my external monitor it didn't happen. Actually it stopped happening after the third time I restarted.

It was weird, it wasn't like artifacts or anything, it was a pure scramble. ONLY the mouse cursor was not scrambled, but it was frozen.

I had also tried using the memory card reader so I was thinking it might have been a driver conflict with that. Only the second time it happened there was no card in the slot. It was an XD card, but the day before it worked perfectly fine with an SD card. So maybe that was it?

 

Could just be a random glitch caused by drivers, sure. If it isn't persistent and reproduceable, you may be good. If you're still within a warranty period, though, I'd keep a close eye on it and be prepared to give it up for a factory service check in the near future if the problem happens again.

 

You might be right. Sounds like drivers. It could be ATi/AMD's Powerplay settings(when jumping from hibernation, standby, or battery modes) that might be causing the instability as I have experienced something like this on my W3V(albeit much older) with a scrambled display. I suspect that the Core/MEM clock settings are incorrectly being set when Powerplay kicks in and causing the video card to crash. Get yourself new ATi/AMD drivers from laptopvideo2go or omegadrivers.net and see if this occurs again.