Re: [Hampshire] Laptop display borked.

2009/9/27 Paul Stimpson <paul@???>:
> Hi Adam,
>
> Sorry to hear your machine is sick.
>
> Does the GPU have its own memory or is it shared/UMA (stolen from the system's memory)? If it takes memory from the machine's pool then a badly seated / duff DIMM might produce both symptoms you're seeing (corrupt graphics and crashes).
>
> I would try taking each stick of RAM out in turn or moving them around and seeing if the symptoms change. If you can get the machine to start and display then I would run memtest86 for a few passes and see if it finds any problems.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul.

Paul,

thanks for the tip - my guess is that the memory is shared, although
that's just a guess.

Removing it and replacing it did give a good BIOS display (as before
the fault) - which I thought would be permanent, so I quickly did a
hard-shutdown to move the laptop to a more comfortable place, but then
when it rebooted, it's doing the same borked display. Are these memory
cards pretty universal? If so, I could buy another from Novatech and
try that one.

Adam