Woke up to tiny Purple dots on Monitor omg help!

Ok I'm really scared now.

I have an Acer 5742G with a GT 540M

I left my computer on for about 7 hours overnight while I slept with a game running minimized. It's not a very high end game, it does tend to warm the computer a little though. More the hard drive than the GPU. I have a pretty awesome cooling system from coolermaster. My GPU never goes over about 67C which I consider low because WoW used to push it to about 88C at some stages. My hard drive never goes over about 42C which I consider low too.

So I woke up this morning, I opened the lid of my computer (I shut it to turn it off to prevent screen burning) and I had 3 thick vertical bars of tiny purple dots on my desktop. They looked like the sort of dots that in Mspaint when you used the spraycan brush and they were purple.

When moving my mouse over them they disappeared.

I am scared s¤2&6tless that I have overheaded my graphics card.. is this something that I will have to send my laptop in for? I bought this laptop to do gaming, if I cant even leave it running overnight with an insane cooling system on what the hell can I do??!

I checked the temps quickly.
GPU was at 67C
HDD was at 40C

I consider that really low, not high enough to have a problem with.

The game was minimized as well to the taskbar and when I opened it, it looked fine.. I run it minimized in the taskbar because it uses less graphics power if it's not rendering everything on-screen all the time. I just needed the game open to keep a shop open to sell items. The game is Nostale, and it has really, really low specs. My GPU card is a GT 540M it's a pretty powerful card... it can play most things on max without complaining.

Please help. The laptop still has about 8 months of warranty yet. I couldn't have cooked it already could I? Surely there has to be a normal non-serious explanation!

 

DId you restart it and they are still there? How about letting it sit turned off for a while? I doubt you overheated the card if those where the max temps it reached. Also, was the Keyboard hot when you opened it?

 

I got a purple stripe while playing Borderlands once.
Freaked me out.
It was still there after a restart but when i connected my notebook to my HDTV it finally disappeared.

Wierd thing is that when i play without OC i barely hit 75°C with stock cooling.
Enabling max fan speed lowers that number by 5 to 10 degrees.

 

The only time I've had graphics corruption like that was when a GPU overheated and subsequently went out... it could be the graphics memory. Are you overclocking it at all?

My first suggestion would be to leave the lid open at all times. Many laptops have some airflow through the keyboard and depend on that.

 

Ok so it would be better for the screen to be on and the laptop lid open? Maybe that's why it got so hot and when I opened it, it could have significantly cooled before I was able to take a temperature reading.

No I did a restart straight away after the dots disappeared when I moved my mouse over them and the dots are gone... I'm using it now. It seems fine, I checked my temp logs and the highest the temps got to was 68C.

Hopefully it was just some sort of freak out when I opened the lid and the screen suddenly went on.

I'm not overclocking my laptop at all. I don't really believe in overclocking... if anything, I either buy overclocked stuff, that is built to be overclocked or I leave it as it is.

I want to be able to game though without this happening again. If it happens again I'm going to have to take it back to the store and ask them to fix it for me. I just don't like the idea with warranties because it just feels like an endless loop of sending your machine back enough times until it really gets fixed. I've just heard so many horror stories about warranties not doing anything and that your computer is as good as dead even if it breaks under a warranty.

The temps I recorded were nowhere near as high as they could be. I'm just hoping I haven't overheated it whilst playing Borderlands or WoW in the past (1-2 months ago) and that it's now coming back to haunt me or something. Surely laptops can take insane temps though. This laptop wouldn't have a GT 540M in it if it couldn't take the temps. Even though the lid was closed the cooler I have forces cold air into the bottom of the laptop. It dramatically cools the laptop as it sucks air in from the bottom by default and expells it out the side.. I've always had a cool laptop that's why I almost sh/!" my pants off this morning when I woke up and saw my screen with dots all over it.

I've never had any shut downs or errors with this computer overheating whilst playing anything. In fact the fan doesn't even spin up quickly whilst playing because there is always cold air flowing in from the bottom. I've practically built an environment for my compute because I don't like the heat stress they go through. That's why I have no idea how this happened.

Today has not been my day at all. If my laptop is broken I'm totally done for Uni-wise I have my half exams coming up now..

The keyboard wasn't hot at all but the fingerpad (mousepad) was sorta hot. I've had it get so hot though with WoW that touching it was quite uncomfortable. It definitely wasn't that hot at all. So that means the HDD was hot (HDD sits under there) not the GPU.

 

It's best to fight your fear right now and do a quick troubleshooting. Fire up the games you usually play and do so for a while as ir normal use.

Use everything you normally do, restar the system for a couple of times.

It might have been a memory overheat during the time, but if everything I mentioned before works, you shouldn't have any problems. I once overclocked a bit too high and had my screen corrupt in a weird way, showing dots everywhere and the image getting worse. I restarted and everything was normal again and ever since, I never had problems.

if your machine has issues, better get them known fast while you can act. That's why I had a netbook by when I was in college, as a backup for anything like that happening.

 

lol a few minutes ago i saw a bright white dead pixel in the corner of my screen and its gone now. and it wasn't dust.
Edit: ok wdf when you set the backround of your desktop to black using the windows solid color black it has one white pixel right in the top left corner. dear m$ you are dumb!

 

a picture or screen shot would help next time as it could be a number of things.

 

It was 5:30am and I was barely awake. I should have thought to take a picture but yeah. I didn't...

Well once I overclocked a gigabyte board in a very old PC and I set the settings to the highest they could go. Instantly my screen fuzzed out and did almost the exact same thing except I had lines as well and everything was yellow. I have no idea if the colour means anything.

Simply shutting my computer down that time and restarting it with the default settings everything worked fine. But I was 13 then and had no idea that a 3.5V+ overvolting could possibly be dangerous haha.

Now I don't overclock anymore.

I will test my games when I get home. I might fire up mirrors edge and crank everything up etc. If my computer starts to bug out I'll grab my receipt of purchase and get this thing fixed asap and then try and worry about a replacement laptop from a friend or something just for a bit.

This is really nerve racking. I don't want my laptop to break yet. I was under the impression if I left it on my desk, bought an awesome cooler for it and always treated it respectfully that it would last years.. not 4 months..

Here is a silly 5 second picture of basically what it looked like but this is a school computer:

 

Op " just needed the game open to keep a shop open to sell items."
Are you running the game to keep the computer out of sleep/hibernate mode?

 

Absolutely not. To make cash in the game you afk and sell your items. Which requires your computer to be on. Almost everyone leaves their pc/laptop on overnight to sell a ton of stuff in the market place. Many MMORPGs do it.

I definitely don't have problems with hibernation or sleep. I can change those settings in 2 mouse clicks. I'm about to do a burn-in test on my PC and see if it fuzzles out... SiSandra has awesome benchmarking and stress testing tools.

 

Your prob over this but saw this when I was having the same issue. For your issue of not wanting the monitor to stay on there is freeware you can download that will turn your monitor off and give you a key combo to turn it back on. Just do a google search.

 

Most laptops also have a function key that will turn the screen off until you manually turn it back on as well.