Reds and blue dots on screen + video card crashing

whats ur laptop specs???normally display artifact use to occurs because of graphic card problem or due to driver problem....specify ur laptop cofiguration

Thanks for the reply!
Not really sure what you're asking or need to know, but I have an
AMD A8-4500M processor
Radeon HD Graphics - 1.90GHz
6 GB of RAM
Windows 7 64bit SP 1

Anything else I should tell you?

ok what i need to know is that what ver of catalyst is installed on ur laptop..u said its radeon graphic card...u need to update ur graphic card driver... current latest ver. of catalyst is 12.8.. so tell me which ver is there in ur laptop?

u can use GPU-z software ..it gives u full specification of ur graphic card..
here is the link
http://www.filehippo.com/download_gpuz/..

Well GPU-Z is telling me my current version is 8.942.1.0.

I looked for drivers on AMD.com but they didn't have an option for my card which is a Radeon HD 7640G. They have an option for 7XXXM series but not for G series. I used the auto-detect, but it said it couldn't identify my card or operating system.

Hold up, GPU-z is giving me two options for graphic cards.
the 7640G and the 7730M which have the same driver version.

catalyst 12.8 will work well with 7730 M.....no issue u can download it from here..for win 7 64 bit..
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ati_catalyst_vista_64...

the ver u have mentioned is quite old one...so do update..in this case first u have to uninstall previous driver completely ...u can do this as following

Start>control panel>uninstall a program>click on Amd catalyst install manager>click uninstall ALL amd sofware>follow the steps.reboot it ..

then start ur pc in safe mode...
run driver sweeper software in administrative mode....u can download it from following link
http://www.guru3d.com/content-page [...] eeper.html

run this software...(in safe mode with run as administrator)
it allows u to remove all left over driver files..which might be interfere with new driver installation so remove the files which u wanted...
so now u r clear of all old driver files .now start it and do fresh installation of latest amd driver...at present it is catalyst 12.8...
then tell me if it works or not....

Okay thanks a lot I'll try that tomorrow. Question though: why do they not ship the pc with th latest drivers installed?

YEA its good question..even when u buy a new graphic card..they always give older ver of driver along with gpu in cd...   ...
tell me whether it worked or not....

I haven't been able to try it since I was too busy during the weekend but the link you sent me on filehippo is for windows vista. So is it compatible with windows 7?

And once I uninstall all of the current drivers will they still be on my computer so I can revert back to them if something goes wrong?

yup it is compatible with win 7..and yes there is option in control penal to create restore point..so you can revert it back..don't worry it will be fine do it ,get rid of all unwanted driver files and do a fresh install of driver.

Sorry for the late reply, but I updated the drivers for my graphic card and I believe that solved all of my problems i described, or at least i think so (nothing's happened so far), but twice now my computer has randomly restarted itself.

Everything just goes black then it boots up again giving me different startup options (normal, safe mode, etc.). It doesn't give me any error message or alert once everything has booted up again so I have no idea what could be causing this.

have you made any changes in bios?.

You should turn off Automatically Restart option in Windows to be able to see the BSOD messages and codes.

Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced System Options -> Startup and Recovery -> Settings -> Uncheck Automatically Restart

Once you have the BSOD codes and messages, post them here.

What are the bios docxxx is talking about?

And I disabled automatic restart, but when my computer crashed today is displayed no information on start up and I tried searching for the log in the event viewer and searching for the dump file but had no success.

Any ideas to the source of this problem?

You are having total system freezes such that no BSOD or error codes are generated and recorded.

What I can suggest is, since this is a new laptop, you had better contact the manufacturer or the dealer/seller for warranty repair or replacement.

Well it happened again and I got the blue screen with some codes I don't know how to interpret.
On start up it gave me an error message this time which I also don't know how to interpret or if it tells me the source of the problem.

Please read http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/window... . It may help resolve your issue.

Also sthda64.sys ( this file appears in your BSOD picture ) is not in my Windows 7 x64 system. Find it and check its properties if it is a legitimate driver file. Please run autoruns http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb96390... and locate sthda64.sys and temporarily disable it ( uncheck its box ). Restart your computer and see if your problem recurs.