Laptop screen occasionally freezes and displays rainbow squares

[signal prairie]

My laptop screen keeps freezing and displays these rainbow squares, anyone knows what’s going on? I have to force shut down so many times

[bitter parrot]

how often does it happen? If it happens pretty frequently, then go into bios and leave it there for a while, see if it happens in there. Then that would indicate whether it is a software issue like the display drivers

[signal prairie]

It happens like once every 10 mins, I’ll try the bios thing

[signal prairie]

Update: I tried the bios screen and it still froze with the rainbow pixelated lines

[tidal shore]

the gpu is fried

[minor kayak]

RIP GPU

That's 100% a hardware issue if it occurs in bios.

[bitter parrot]

What model of laptop is it? If you have a warranty then try and return it.

[signal prairie]

It’s an XPS 15 9500, bought it like 4 years ago

[bitter parrot]

Try updating the BIOS. Maybe they fixed this in a new firmware update. But luckily there’s lots of videos on that laptop, so it would be relatively easy to replace the motherboard. It’s ~$500 though if you look on eBay.

[signal prairie]

Could a faulty ssd be the cause? I saw a few messages with my hard drive is failing but when I run scans they show up empty

[bitter parrot]

That's possible, I mean computers are pretty complex with all their parts interacting. Try checking that and the RAM by opening the laptop up. Make sure to just follow one of the tutorials on YouTube. You don't need an SSD to boot into the BIOS, so just remove the SSD and check if the same thing happens when you get in the BIOS. You need one stick of RAM to boot though, so try each stick individually in both slots. Make sure to unplug the battery from the motherboard. And while you're there might as well try a power drain. So just leave it there with the battery disconnected, hold the power button for a bit and just leave it for ~30 mins. Cause even when it's off the motherboard still maintains a voltage ~2v maybe. And there are components like capacitors and coils which can act like a battery. So maybe there's some weird electrical issue.

[dark trench]

I would not ....do that on a machine known to crash unexpectedly like this

[bitter parrot]

Oh ya that’s a good point. Should check the hardware before trying that.