2009/1/2 David King <[email protected]>: > My girlfriend is running Ubuntu 8.04 on her Dell Inspiron 1525 > (preinstalled), but had a few graphics issues recently. > I was playing a game (Penguin Planet Racer) full screen and it crashed > the laptop, could not get out of it other than a hard reboot. > I disabled some of the Compiz effects, in case that was overloading the > graphics chip, which I think is an Intel chip. > > Today she said she booted it as normal, and then when she logged in, > there were various small lines on the screen that were never there before. > > Is this likely to be a software issue or a hardware problem? > > David
As others have said, try a live CD. Ideally something totally non-Ubuntu, such as Knoppix. Also, try connecting it to an external screen. If it still shows lines or other display corruption, it's a hardware issue. It's hard to see how a game could cause hardware problems, but I've seen a couple of laptops recently with fried graphics chips. This means a new main board, basically - an expensive repair. I can only imagine that the cooling on the GPU or the Northbridge (if it has chipset-integrated graphics) might have been inadequate - perhaps a fan clogged with dust or fluff. In normal desktop use, it only runs in 2D and never gets loaded. But when running a 3D game for a while, it would be running flat out, overheat and possibly cook itself. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: [email protected] • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: [email protected] Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: [email protected] • MSN/Messenger: [email protected] Yahoo: [email protected] • Skype: liamproven • ICQ: 73187508 -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
