Acer Aspire V5-171 - screen goes psychadelic - possible video card failure?

clockworkorange
clockworkorange Member Posts: 1 New User

I'm seeing intermittent failures where the display becomes psychadelic - in other words it suddenly goes crazy displaying a random bunch of pixels and colours.

 

When this happens, the laptop is non-responsive and can only be rebooted by removing and reattaching the battery.

 

I often connect the laptop to an LCD TV via HDMI and extend the desktop to span the two displays. This worked well for many months, but recently the problem arose just after disconnecting the laptop from the TV. My first guess was a video card (or other component) failure due to overheating (the laptop runs much hotter when connected to the TV and streaming Netflix).

 

Subsequently, the problem has also occurred (occasionally) when booting the laptop from cold after a long period of inactivity. Perhaps this is due to damage sustained earlier.

 

Has anyone else seen this, or can you suggest the cause - video card, RAM, something else?

The laptop is running Windows 8.

 

Thanks

Answers

  • AppsDev
    AppsDev Member Posts: 35

    Tinkerer

    Well I might suspect the graphics card/GPU first, although RAM is easier to change.

     

    Clive

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