Dell Inspiron 7437 crashes and intermittently I get a weird "pepper and salt" pattern in the middle of the screen

Hi there,

Please can you help with advise on 2 main problems with my 2 yr old Inspiron 7437.

As a background, I upgraded to Windows 10 recently and already 1 yr ago replaced the HDD with SSD. However, it crashed quite often before the upgrade to W10. The strange video pattern started to appear recently, but I had a major problem 6 months ago (before the upgrade) that was also indicative – the screen went all barmy in the middle of a presentation to 40 people and I had to restart.

1. Crashes: they are random, about once every few days, usually the screen goes black and I can move the mouse arrow but nothing happens and I have to manually should down by holding the power-button. Sometimes I just get the BSOD (W10 style with some error code like “exception_” or something). I look at Events Log afterwards and strangely don’t see and “critical errors” logged, but I am not very sure about that.

2. Strange pattern on the screen: randomly, I get some “pepper and salt” dots of many colours, broadly in the middle of the screen. I didn’t take a photo but it appears “through” the display of programs opened and other than some nuisance, it doesn’t seem to cause other problem, although at least once, the screen went black but the dots stayed and I had to do a hard-reset.

My Windows 10 is updated. Please advise – can it be some unruly driver, etc.? Thanks in advance.