At work a guy brought in (for repair), a Sony Vaio laptop with a nice i7 and GT 520M graphics... anyway apparently he has green artifacts intermittently.
Last time he brought it in (claiming the same problem) the technician reinstalled Windows 7, and at that time the customer bought and brought us a brand new Intel 240GB SSD to install it on. I don't know whether the other tech actually was able to replicate the problem or not because it doesn't mention that in the work order notes.
Anyway, this time he was having the green artifacts, and also said the fan gets really loud sometimes. He says he mainly uses the computer to edit PDFs.
So, after confirming that the fan was spinning very quickly after the laptop was on for a short period of time, I blew out the dust with our compressor and wow, it was very dusty! Now the fan spins normally.
But I have no idea what to do on that graphcis issue. First thing I did was install Unigine Valley and Furmark to stress the GPU. Neither caused any glitches or artifacts. I did update the nVidia driver from an older version (it looks like it was not updated since when he brought the computer to us last time in 2014). I left both Valley and Furmark running for about 10 mins each with no issues.
The only thing I noticed (by accident) is that if you move the screen of the laptop open and closed it makes the Windows device removed/inserted noise. Every single time at around the same spot... when it goes from a L to < shape and back, if you know what I mean. But, the display does not flicker at all, the driver doesn't crash (or else Windows would pop up that the video driver has crashed and been recovered).
I also ran an sfc /scannow and Windows did not find any problems, and I checked the SSD (health is excellent)
Anyway tomorrow I think I will test the RAM with MemTest86 but I just don't know where to go from there. Clearly the original technician thought it was a software issue, but I doubt it since the issue has reoccured between Windows installs. It is the "Sony" OEM version of Windows 7 (off of the restore partition, not from a DVD, since it has all the Vaio programs and the Vaio Windows 7 logon screen background).
Thank you for any input before I call it a bad motherboard.
Last time he brought it in (claiming the same problem) the technician reinstalled Windows 7, and at that time the customer bought and brought us a brand new Intel 240GB SSD to install it on. I don't know whether the other tech actually was able to replicate the problem or not because it doesn't mention that in the work order notes.
Anyway, this time he was having the green artifacts, and also said the fan gets really loud sometimes. He says he mainly uses the computer to edit PDFs.
So, after confirming that the fan was spinning very quickly after the laptop was on for a short period of time, I blew out the dust with our compressor and wow, it was very dusty! Now the fan spins normally.
But I have no idea what to do on that graphcis issue. First thing I did was install Unigine Valley and Furmark to stress the GPU. Neither caused any glitches or artifacts. I did update the nVidia driver from an older version (it looks like it was not updated since when he brought the computer to us last time in 2014). I left both Valley and Furmark running for about 10 mins each with no issues.
The only thing I noticed (by accident) is that if you move the screen of the laptop open and closed it makes the Windows device removed/inserted noise. Every single time at around the same spot... when it goes from a L to < shape and back, if you know what I mean. But, the display does not flicker at all, the driver doesn't crash (or else Windows would pop up that the video driver has crashed and been recovered).
I also ran an sfc /scannow and Windows did not find any problems, and I checked the SSD (health is excellent)
Anyway tomorrow I think I will test the RAM with MemTest86 but I just don't know where to go from there. Clearly the original technician thought it was a software issue, but I doubt it since the issue has reoccured between Windows installs. It is the "Sony" OEM version of Windows 7 (off of the restore partition, not from a DVD, since it has all the Vaio programs and the Vaio Windows 7 logon screen background).
Thank you for any input before I call it a bad motherboard.
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