Corrupt screens on laptop - software or hardware?

[Fat Tone]

Hi

My son has a MSI laptop he is using at Uni. I forget the model but its a quad core i7, 16GB, etc.

It's been ok for just over a year (and now of course the warranty has run out).

He has always used it with external monitors, in various configurations. Now he is getting a problem at boot sometimes where the laptop screen and both external screens (HDMI and DisplayPort) are essentially a white screen. If you look closely they are narrow vertical stripes of white, red and green. A couple of reboots will fix it. I can't seem to attach a pic.

Any ideas what this is likely to be? Failing hardware? He hasn't done any very recent driver updates and there weren't any to be had when checking.

Thanks

T.

[UtwigMU]

From symptoms seems monitor is fine, the problem is with GPU. Could also be overheating.

[Jammrock]

Or a bad driver/firmware update. If you get the banding during boot then it's something low level. UEFI BIOS's store a portion of many drivers in memory that can sometimes get corrupted. Because power is rarely actually gone on laptops and other mobile devices this driver cache never really gets cleared.

Disconnect power and pull the battery out of the laptop (if possible) and let it sit for a a few minutes with no power. A true zero power state will flush anything UEFI is holding in memory.

Also get a can of compressed air and blast out the heatsinks with it. Laptop heatsinks tend to get dust buildup that need to be blasted out to cool properly. No need to take anything apart, just shoot air through the vents and dodge the dust cloud.

Lastly, look for system updates, like UEFI/BIOS and GPU driver. Just in case there is/was an issue and it has been corrected.

[Fat Tone]

Thanks, have passed that on and will see what occurs.

Cheers

Tony.