My computer crashed, and a weird pattern of pixels was left on the screen

Question

I was messing around with window.open() in JavaScript, to try and make patterns with the popups, and I hit around 250ish Google Chrome windows when my computer crashed. I got an error labeled WerFault.exe - Application Error, that said The application was, and then has an OK button.

The computer restarted and everything seemed to be back to normal, except for a section of weird pixel patterns right in the middle of my screen. The pattern occasionally disappears or changes, but it usually looks like this.

Can I get rid of this?

I'm using Windows 10 Pro on a ThinkPad Edge. I think this is it.

Solution 1

It appears to be a memory issue. To see if it's just temporary, do a full shutdown and reboot.

• Press Windows and type CMD.
• Press Enter to get a CMD prompt.
• Type shutdown /s /t 0 .
• Reboot and check for the pixel problem.
• If that does not resolve the issue, turn off Fast Startup, which may be caching invalid data, and repeat the steps above.

Let me know if this helps!

Solution 2

Like DrMoishe Pippik said, maybe a full shut-down helps. To do it you can also use the reboot option, because afaik it also performs a full shut-down and reboot, instead of just saving the ram to the disk like the shut-down does.

If there is still that error, either it is the framebuffer like PlasmaHH wrote or an error in the RAM. If it is in the RAM you can try to start a Memtest86+ using a linux live image for example (e.g. Linux Mint)

Another option: Lenovo offers software for diagnosis. You can find that here: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/gb/en/lenovodiagnosticsolutions

Bests

Comments

[no id]

I would also consider switching the computer off for a while to see if this is a memory overheat issue.

[PlasmaHH]

Given the pattern it doesn't look like a memory fault at all to me, more like someone wrote something into the framebuffer that doesn't belong there, or more specifically (X)or'd it with the contents already there. I would suggest to update drivers

[Hitechcomputergeek]

Choosing "Reboot" in the GUI already does a full shutdown, unlike "Shutdown", which (by default) does a partial hibernate in order to speed up boot times.

[Daniel F]

@PlasmaHH I doubt that it is a framebuffer issue. If it disappears and later reappears, this means that it must be somewhere in memory. Probably some bitmap that got corrupted. If a reboot doesn't solve this, I'd also vote for reinstalling drivers. I'd shut it down (no hybernate) and take the battery out for some seconds.

[PlasmaHH]

@DanielF: If it is faulty memory, then it would need to repeat every 1366 pixels, which would really be an amazing coincidence

[Daniel F]

@PlasmaHH I'm more thinking along the lines of a sprite (like the Windows start button or a mouse cursor). Of course that doesn't explain why it is left at that position. Yet it is possible to create transparent windows and have them in the foreground and make them non-focusable, click-throughy, without a window frame. Hard to tell.

[Wyzard]

@PlasmaHH, it's not uncommon for GPUs to store image data in tiled form, for better spatial locality (pixels near each other on the screen are near each other in memory). I've seen a failing video card that would display multiple corrupted blocks like that, scattered across the monitor.

[Joshua]

Oh the mouse cursor's in the sprite. Yeah I've seen that. There wasn't enough memory to allocate the area behind the sprite so it trashed memory on merge.