Snowy laptop lockup

August 13, 2007 5:30 PM

My laptop screen randomly locks up and gets all 'snowy', I have no idea why.

So my laptop likes to lockup at random, the screen gets jumbled and 'snowy' looking and the whole system freezes. When this happens, it seems to be when I am working with it, either on the internet, IM or office software, or just doing random tasks on the desktop. I play games on it occasionally and it has not locked up in-game before. I also leave it on for long periods of time downloading files and I have never come back to find it locked up (although it has locked up shortly upon resuming use after leaving it running for a long time).

Whenever it locks like that, I have to turn it off and reboot it, and everthing works fine when it reboots, so I am confident it's not the LCD screen itself. (also, the LCD was cracked earlier this month and it jsut came back from repair, the lockups happened before the LCD repair and have continued after I got it back, it's not the screen)

I have no idea what's causing this. I've built/modded/overclocked several computers in the past and am pretty computer savvy, but I have never seen this kind of lockup/crash before. My best guess is some sort of RAM error or a particularly hard/obscure software conflict, maybe even a video card problem, though I would have expected that would have showed up during a gaming session. Google-fu tells me any of the above are plausible explanations. I dont really want to send it off to get repaired again since it's so close to the start of the semester, but I dont want to lose any valuable work later on either.

Basically- does anyone have any idea what could be causing this and how to fix it? Or alternatively- what's the best way to go about isolating potential causes on a laptop without interchangeable hardware?

The laptop is a Sony SZ series, 1gb DDR2, GeForce Go 7400, all drivers are up to date.

posted by T.D. Strange to technology (3 comments total)

Could it be a virus?
posted by Eringatang at 8:06 PM on August 13, 2007

You might want to try booting into safe mode and do some of your normal activity...see if you get this symptom while in safe mode. Hardware speaking...try using an external monitor if possible to see if in fact the vid card is to blame rather than the lcd.
posted by swiffa at 9:54 PM on August 13, 2007

I had to send in my Dell Latitude D630 because of the same problems. It turns out that the graphics card was a dud.

Does Sony have some sort of pre-boot diagnostic test that you can run? Dell uses Fn-Power to boot into the diagnostic tests. When I ran them I got an error that pointed to the graphics card.
posted by billtron at 6:46 AM on August 14, 2007