Saturday, April 17, 2010

Dell Latitude E6400 video artifact problem with the Intel GMA 4500MHD

Ran into a weird video problem with a E6400 recently. I tried updating drivers, changing settings, and all the usual stuff but it would show up again within the first 15 minutes, give or take a few. So I decided to research into the video chipset itself and found that users on multiple laptop makes and models appeared to be suffering the same problem. See example below.

I found the solution on one of the lenovo forums http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T500-with-intel-gma-4500mhd-increase-system-video-memory/m-p/132267 (See post by dragon-fly). Apparently, there's an issue when there are a unmatched pair of different size memory modules. This particular laptop had a 4GB and 2GB in it so I swapped out the 2GB for a 4GB. And entertainingly enough, the problem went away right after that. It's been a few days now and the problem hasn't reappeared once yet.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Thank you I've been battling this problem and could not figure out what was causing this. I will try and reverse my memory to see if that helps.

Unknown said...

Thank you I've been battling this problem for some time now and couldn't figure out why. I will try and reverse the memory modules to see what results I get.

Jason said...

Thanks for posting this fix. I was going crazy trying to find a resolution for this issue on any other sites. I contacted Dell with this fix (swapping out my 2GB stick of RAM for a matching 1GB stick but also dropping from 3GB total to 2GB total RAM) and they said that since I upgraded from a working Windows XP operating system to Windows 7, then the resolution is to downgrade to Windows XP. They have a few others contacting them with this same issue but it is an isolated issue. Thanks for spreading the word!

Anonymous said...

Fantastic submit. Many thanks for posting about it

Rod said...

Excellent. Had the same problem with a win 7 install on my 6400 . This post saved me a lot of head scratching!