T500 screen bitrot?

My years old Thinkpad T500 seems to be experiencing occasional video artifacts. This is noticeable when examining long lists of repetitive text such as listings from backups. The manifestation is the corruption - partial blanking - of an occasional character. The corruption can be seen in a screen capture and they look like:



First of all, I'm curious if this is an interesting phenomena or something that is warning me of the pending demise of my laptop. Second, I'm curious to know just what causes this.

This is an Intel based laptop with "Intel Integrated Graphics 4500MHD" that share main memory with video memory. The system has 8GB RAM total and a "Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz" processor and I'm running Linux.

Thanks!

Have you ever had it apart and cleaned out all the fur?? It may just be getting too hot. It's pretty common for laptops to suck up a lot of crap.

Yeah. About a year or two ago. I had to replace the fan. You are absolutely correct, it was astounding how much dust and cat hair it had jammed around the old fan. I also redid the TIM for the processor and some other chip.

I'll try to pay attention to whether that happens when the processor is particularly warm. ... Nope, I can make it happen right now and I just brought the laptop out of suspension so everything is still cold.

Thanks.

Have you run memtest86+ lately? Shared video memory could be corrupted.

petteyg359 said:

Have you run memtest86+ lately? Shared video memory could be corrupted.

Click to expand...

Good suggestion and not good result. 50 minutes (65% into the test) the system locked up solid with no errors reported. I restarted the test and it completed one pass and nearly a second before I terminated.

I think it is time to disassemble and clean out the cobwebs and cat hair and reapply TIM where needed.

Thanks for the suggestion. I had no reason to suspect RAM because the system has been very stable, but the test did reveal a problem.