Bear with my shitty descriptions and wall of text here, I haven't managed to get any screenshots yet but I'm working on it
Artifacting #1 - My Geforce 8800M GTS is starting to have some artifacting. Not sure what's going on with it - I minimized World of Warcraft using alt tab, opened it up again and the screen had diagonal black pixelated lines going across the screen. Upon attempting to exit the game froze for a few seconds and the artifacting went away before the game closed. That's the first time it's happened, I haven't seen it happen since.
Artifacting #2 - I thought it may of just been a driver bug or something but I've also noticed a second type of artifacting - every so often (seems to be roughly once a week) I'll see barely noticeable vertical black lines "waving" across my screen occasionally. This type of artifacting isn't persistent, I'll only see it in short intervals that last for a second or two each. When it comes it comes in "fits" where I'll see the lines for 1-2 seconds at a time waving across my screen. They'll stop for a minute or two then come back, restarting what ever I'm playing seems to stop it until it comes back a week or so later. So far this has happened in TF2, WoW and even persists on my desktop if I alt-tab the game I'm playing while its artifacting.
Artifacting # 3- The third thing is my mouse icon has been randomly turning into a colorful pixelated square for roughly 1 second before turning back to normal. So far its happened very little, only about 3 times over the course of months.
Other information:
My drivers were a few versions behind but I've updated them the other day so they are currently up to date
I only had problems with overheating for about 2 days when I first pulled this old laptop out from 'storage' (sitting in my closet untouched for years) After I thought to clean the dust out I've never had a heat problem since and I've been blowing it out once a month.
That being said, some questions:
If you can get anything out of my poor descriptions about artifacting, do you think this is possible GPU death or software related bugs?
If my GPU is done for is it replaceable? I've heard most laptops have the GPU's soldered in (excluding some of the very expensive high end ones with replaceable and even upgradeable GPU's) so am I pretty much fucked?
Artifacting #1 - My Geforce 8800M GTS is starting to have some artifacting. Not sure what's going on with it - I minimized World of Warcraft using alt tab, opened it up again and the screen had diagonal black pixelated lines going across the screen. Upon attempting to exit the game froze for a few seconds and the artifacting went away before the game closed. That's the first time it's happened, I haven't seen it happen since.
Artifacting #2 - I thought it may of just been a driver bug or something but I've also noticed a second type of artifacting - every so often (seems to be roughly once a week) I'll see barely noticeable vertical black lines "waving" across my screen occasionally. This type of artifacting isn't persistent, I'll only see it in short intervals that last for a second or two each. When it comes it comes in "fits" where I'll see the lines for 1-2 seconds at a time waving across my screen. They'll stop for a minute or two then come back, restarting what ever I'm playing seems to stop it until it comes back a week or so later. So far this has happened in TF2, WoW and even persists on my desktop if I alt-tab the game I'm playing while its artifacting.
Artifacting # 3- The third thing is my mouse icon has been randomly turning into a colorful pixelated square for roughly 1 second before turning back to normal. So far its happened very little, only about 3 times over the course of months.
Other information:
My drivers were a few versions behind but I've updated them the other day so they are currently up to date
I only had problems with overheating for about 2 days when I first pulled this old laptop out from 'storage' (sitting in my closet untouched for years) After I thought to clean the dust out I've never had a heat problem since and I've been blowing it out once a month.
That being said, some questions:
If you can get anything out of my poor descriptions about artifacting, do you think this is possible GPU death or software related bugs?
If my GPU is done for is it replaceable? I've heard most laptops have the GPU's soldered in (excluding some of the very expensive high end ones with replaceable and even upgradeable GPU's) so am I pretty much fucked?