Windows 7 Graphics glitch?

[wickedsnow]

Hey guys, so here's the deal.

My company just gave me a new laptop, fresh out of the box. a dell Latitude E5400.

I formatted the drive of course, and installed windows 7 32-bit. After installing the offical windows 7 drivers from the dell website, I got this weird glitch with the minimize/fullscreen/close buttons in any window.

Now, I re-formatted and tried the Intel drivers from their website (it's an intel series 4 graphics card), and I got the same issue.

I have nothing on the machine other than windows and drivers. I have done 11 re-formats trying many different things, temps, new drivers, flashed a new bios, etc etc. Nothing fixes it.

This is a work laptop and I need help fixing this. Any help is welcomed.

FYI, the glitch is a weird tearing effect. (Yes i checked my refresh also.)

I would upload a screenshot, If i knew how on these forums.

 

[wickedsnow]

Also, Disabling aero then re-enabling it, seems to fix it for a little while, but it always comes back.

Disabling aero permanantly is not an option.

 

[techgeek]

There are a couple things I would suggest. They may sound weird.

First off, does this laptop have more than one SO-DIMM? If so try swapping them. I am assuming from your description that it has Intel's integrated GMA graphics. It uses system RAM for graphics processing, and since what you are describing sounds similar to what happens when VRAM goes bad on a discrete card, it's possible that by swapping the DIMM's will stop the suspect one from being used by the integrated graphics.

Also it's possible that the actual framebuffer or graphics portion of the chipset is bad.

Lastly it's kind of funny that Aero is a make or break deal. Having broken hardware is make or break on it's own, regardless of being able to use Aero or not.

P.S. If swapping the SO-DIMMS 'fixes' the problem, it's not really fixed. You will need to replace the SO-DIMM. It may not be easy to determine which one it is. You'll likely have to buy one that matches you pair. Then putting them back to their original location and verify the problem returns. Then swap one with the new one and see if the problem goes away.

Alternately you could try and run Memtest and see if you get errors, it should catch any RAM issues.

 

[wickedsnow]

Techgeek,

Interesting idea, i'll give it a shot. I have read many forum posts from other websites with users with the exact same issue with intel laptop graphics. Maybe it's an intel thing?

Thanks for the advice!