Video kaputt

I've got a 7422GX which has worked perfectly until today. Only think I can recall is the fans failing to start a week ago: the surface got hot for a few minutes until I restarted it and the fans began working OK again.

Today while playing my wife got the horrible stripes and squares of a failing video card. She exited the game (The Sims 2) and the screen was also blurred. After a reboot it was fine again, but the problem returned after a few minutes of starting up the sims again. I decided to reinstall the video drivers.
At the third reboot, the boot screen showed up blurred. It spelled certain doom. I booted it again a few times and it would be readable just for 2 or 3 minutes before the errors appeared.

At this time I was certain the video card was dead. I took my screwdriver and opened the laptop to the maximum extent, till I reached the Athlon and the video CPU. The latter is soldered to the mainboard, as well as the video memory chips (which are under the DVD). Unable to do anything but apply pressure, I did just that.

I booted it up again and there were the same artifacts. It was simply unreadable. Struggling to read the menus, I downgraded XP's video effects to the minimum and video acceleration to the middle of the slider. I turned it off for a while and then back on. This time it worked flawlessly.

What puzzles me is the following: I had a second hard disk, with two partitions: one Linux (Mandriva) with ATI drivers and the second one "hackintosh", which uses a lot of graphics. I inserted that disk into my PC expecting to see an array of errors, but none ocurred.

I have put the XP disk back on the PC. I have no spare computer right now and don't want to give my video card any more stress tests, so I won't load any game or benchmarking tool. It's been working for 4 straight hours now and no sign of the video failure for now.

Has anyone been through the same? I'm in Spain now and there's no way to get it fixed for less than what a new PC would cost. Is it definitely a burned out video card? What on earth can explain its sudden/apparent recovery?

 

it could be that the fact u have opened ur laptop, got as far as the cpu and gpu, meaning that u must have done some good cleaning and applying new thermal paste before putting the machine back together

cheers ...

 

Uhmmmm ... Wish I'd had some thermal paste at hand ...

Right now I'm working with a Windows 2000 look, the only thing that reminds me of the failure is the AMD Power Monitor, which comes up blurred. Hope it stays this way till I can get a new PC. I'll miss my games, though.

 

overheating causing gpu to "fail" and intermittengly shutdown is quite common for eMachines/Gateway - more so than any other brands. This could be due to the fact they use lousy thermal tape from the factory.

using good thermal paste would definitively restore ur laptop back to as before, providing that it is the heating issue

as for gpu, it probabaly has a gap between the surface to the heatsink, you can try there a thermal tap thick enough to force the contact so that the fan comes on earlier.

update to date processor driver and computer driver (from ms - ACPI) also adds to performance improvement

cheers ...

 

Thanks for the advice. I did notice the scarce amount of thermal paste. As I mentioned earlier: I won't test it again till I can get a spare machine. Hope it isn't too late.

 

Alavena, I'm having a very similar problem with my 7422GX. The CPU keeps overheating (even after a short amount of time), and the computer crashes constantly. I've opened the computer as far as I know how, which gets me to the heatsink. I've cleaned that as much as possible, which initially helped, however the problems have returned despite cleaning the heatsink as much as possible.

I'd love to take out the heatsink, clean it properly, and then replace it. However I'm not completely sure how to go about it. Do you think you can tell me how you did it?

Thanks!

 

Well. I loosened the screws and took it off, but didn't mess with it because i don't have thermal paste at hand.
I'd reccomend you get some thermal paste (artic silver or such) and put it between the processor and the cooler. Cannot think of any other ideas for your heating problem. I've seldom had them and the fans have always kept my machine cold. In fact, I think the problem I report here was a permanent damage from the one and only time my PC overheated because the fans didn't start.

 

So it's as simple as just unscrewing and lifting up? I've often sat there and wondered if I should, but held back because I wasn't sure if there was more to it than those screws. I've ordered some thermal paste, so hopefully next week I can give it a shot.

Thanks for the advice.