Dell M5510 freezes up with black squares on the screen

I have a Dell M5510. I previously had an issue withe battery swelling up which then caused a MB failure. I have since had dell replace the motherboard. This worked fine for around 2 months but recently I started to have an issue. If I left my computer over night when I came to use it the next day I noticed it was restarted.

After further using the computer I found out that it would start to get black squares on the screen and then freeze. It can even do this on initial boot when it first enters windows. I have also got these black squares on the login page for windows. The squares are repetitive almost in a diagonal across the screen. I will capture a screenshot next time it happens.

Once the black squares happen I have about 0-30 seconds before the whole system will freeze. I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a solution for this or tell me where the problem relies?

I have tried to roll back drivers for the video card and various other items as well.

Thank you

 

I would suspect the graphics drivers but it might be worthwhile running a thorough test on the RAM using Memtest 86 left running overnight.

John

 

Does it have a DGPU? If so, can you disable that in the BIOS and see if the issue is still present?

 

The dGPU (Nvidia Quadro M1000M) uses the Nvidia Optimus setup which means that it's dormant unless needed. I don't think it can be disabled but should be inactive under light usage. The Nvidia control panel includes a taskbar icon option which changes to indicate when the dGPU is active. The conditions which could activate the dGPU can also be configured using the control panel.

This configuration points to any problem being with the Intel graphics which is part of the CPU package.

John

 

Indeed --- Unlike the 7510/7710, there is no option to enable or disable graphics switching in the BIOS on the 5510 — graphics switching is always enabled and the Intel GPU will always be used for the display output; the NVIDIA GPU is used for rendering support only.