Dell inspiron 1545 VGA corruption

Hi All,

I have had an Inspiron 1545 for several years now, it is a solid laptop and I have had very very few issues with it,
I have kept the vents and exhaust clear, regularly removing the Heatsink assembly and cleaning out any stuck dust and also reapplying thermal paste.

I was lazy recently and did not clean out the heatsink assembly as I usually do, using the laptop for over a year with a fairly gunked up heatsink,
I finally got around to doing it and also replaced the old worn out thermal pad with a copper shim.

I was careful to align the shim and apply thermal AS5 between all surfaces, the laptop has been working perfectly for a few weeks with a noticeable drop in fan sound, I am unsure of the temperature decrease as I did not monitor previous to the servicing.

In the past few days I have had several occurrences of the laptop freezing completely and the entire screen filling with multicolored graphics corruption/artifacts,
temps are not exceeding 55-60 degrees C, I am not gaming and the fan is not running at full speed when this happens.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the copper shim has done something to cause this, this seems very much like the issue with Nvidia BGA solder balls failing on their VGA chips although this is an Intel GM4500 graphics chip running alongside an intel T4200 2.0ghz CPU.

Could the shim be too thick/thin applying to little or too much pressure, if it was too thin I should see the temps jump, if its too thick perhaps I have applied pressure unevenly around the chip causing it to become raised off the board.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I know its a lot of hypothesizing.

edit - spelling

Wouldn't be a bad idea to get a thermal pad to try, do you know how thick the old one was?
All shims and pads come in different thicknesses.

The original thermal pad had been squashed down to virtually nothing, the centre where the core sits was less than a mm thick, I ended up using a 1.2mm shim I believe.

I got a pack of 3 shim thicknesses, 0.8, 1.2 and 1.5.

I will order a pad and see how it goes, what is causing the corruption, if the temps are staying within limits.

Either try the pad or the 0.8mm shim, definitely sounds like too much pressure if the old pad was under 1mm.

ok great thanks for the idea, I will replace it with a smaller shim and see how that goes, could this have already caused permanent damage?

If it's still (mostly) working permanent damage is unlikely.

ok successfully swapped out the shim for one that has a 0.8mm thickness, laptop seems stable and temps are ok although they are noticeably higher than before, by about 5-6 degrees, I will let the thermal paste break in and then make a final judgement.

Perhaps the previous shim done a better job at transferring heat at the cost of too much pressure on the core,
Thanks for the advice ATMINSIDE!

Glad it's back to stable!!
I'll take the 5°C increase in temps for a laptop that works

I am using dell laptop till i don't have any technical issue.