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Black Squares Appearing - Intermittent - Alienware 17 R3
Hi,
I've an issue with my 5-6 month old Alienware 17 R3. On start-up there are some black squares that appear when I open a browser (Firefox). If you hover over them they disappear or if you refresh the page it normally removes them. This happens maybe 2 in 10 times after booting up. This has been happening from near enough since I got the laptop and hasn't been getting worse. Is anyone aware of what this is and how to fix it?
I'm new to Dell products and have found that you can do performance/stress tests etc through the website but I'm currently at work and in the meanwhile before I can do these I thought I'd ask the question in case anyone can help.
Here's a screenshot of what it looks like (not my image):
https://psg.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/144160iD997838B9E6A4C96?v=1.0
Other symptoms:
From time to time I've noticed the following which may or may not be related.
- One of the USBs on the left side intermittently doesn't display a connected device.
- Sometimes the laptop pauses after it's booted into Windows for a brief second.
- Sometimes the fans spin up for a second or two. I've still to check if this happens on each boot in case it's just something that clears the dust.
speedstep
8 Wizard
8 Wizard
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March 8th, 2017 07:00
This kind of Video Artifact looks like GPU overheating. Some versions of chrome have artifacts disabling hardware acceleration gets rid of them.
You could also do
chrome://components
and check for updates.
I doubt its related to windows because you could F12 boot a live ubuntu Disk and it likely still shows up.
You should be able to F12 boot an ubuntu CD with no hard drive whatsoever.
ubuntu-12.04.5-desktop-i386.isoYoshiK1
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March 8th, 2017 13:00
Thanks for the reply. I had an idea that it was Firefox that was the issue and I believe it is. When I got home I started up the laptop and it did the same thing but with white squares and kept doing it each time I opened the browser. I alternated opening chrome, firefox and IE and the only one to have issues was firefox.
It doesn't appear anywhere else but within the browser and thinking back it never did appear anywhere else other than in firefox. I started looking into it further and found this which is the same issue!
support.mozilla.org/.../1221466
I've also done stress tests on the GPU and the temperatures at 99-100% usage didn't go past 64 degrees and that's in a warm house with the computer desk near a radiator. The fans didn't even spin up.
This can be closed by the mods now.