Problem solved. Video card artifacting

[Meowcenary]

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?

 

[tux9656]

Sound like a damaged GPU or VRAM. Sounds to me like this laptop has reached the end of the line. If your graphics uses system memory as video memory, there is a small chance the GPU is fine, but the memory modules have gone bad. You could verify your memory modules with a memory tester such as memtest86+. If there are errors detected, see if you can barrow a memory module from someone and see if you still get graphics problems.

 

[Meowcenary]

Sound like a damaged GPU or VRAM. Sounds to me like this laptop has reached the end of the line. If your graphics uses system memory as video memory, there is a small chance the GPU is fine, but the memory modules have gone bad. You could verify your memory modules with a memory tester such as memtest86+. If there are errors detected, see if you can barrow a memory module from someone and see if you still get graphics problems.

Thanks for the info. My video card apparently has 512MB of ram so I'm assuming it's probably my video card

I'll try running memtest in the morning and post the results

Any idea how long dieing video cards generally last before completely dieing?

 

[Nothing_Much]

Make and model of laptop? As far as I know, there's these MXM cards that you can put inside gaming laptops that you could upgrade to, but only if there's a slot available for it.

Technically everything on the PC is replaceable, but it would require soldering and a torch in the case of the graphics chip. Or you could attempt to bake the motherboard and see if that helps at all.

Either way you're still better off getting a newer PC if you don't have the technological capabilities to understand what all of the blibber blabber is.

 

[SgtGiraffe]

rip 2 your graphics card boi im not sure if this is relevant or not but my cousins computer started having minor artifacting problems and a month after they started the graphics card was dead

 

[tux9656]

When a graphics card starts exhibiting this behavior, it's already completely dead. If you manage to get a game to work with a card like this, usually it will crash within a matter of minutes and most likely make the whole system lock up with it. Even when not running a game, system stability will be questionable at best.

A problem with gaming on a laptop is that sometimes laptop manufacturers will stuff a GPU into a laptop where there isn't enough air flow to cool the GPU. On many occasions, it is even well known by the laptop manufacturer that their design is flawed, but they manufacture and sell the laptops anyway as to compete with their competitors. This leaves you with a GPU that will die much sooner.