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

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.

Jchabin

Posted 2018-08-12T17:11:38.097

Reputation: 333

21Is the image actually rotated by 45° or did you just not care to take the time to align it with reality? – Daniel F – 2018-08-12T17:48:49.003

20I hope it's actually like that on the screen that would be hilarious. – confetti – 2018-08-12T20:12:56.590

6Does the pattern move if you try moving the mouse? – htmlcoderexe – 2018-08-13T06:42:53.203

1To clarify, does this appear just when you have that alert after pushing things a bit too far (and goes away on reboot), or does it happen after reboot, having done nothing special (and of course without Chrome trying to restore all the windows)? – jcaron – 2018-08-13T08:06:26.267

Windows 10 shows a QR code when BSOD'ed. This resembles something like that too. Wondering if BSOD screen itself got crashed because of out of memory or something and leaked some graphics memory? – Mat J – 2018-08-13T08:31:11.197

2@MatJ could be an attempt to display the application icon but fetching the data from a corrupt memory location? – Daniel F – 2018-08-13T10:33:19.183

Actually, the message "The application was" appears to be a segment of a sentence, like "The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000012d) ...". Maybe even the lookup for the specific error reason text string reached into corrupt memory. – Daniel F – 2018-08-13T10:41:37.890

5Does copying such image to clipboard using PrintScreen key copies this artifact too, or no? Could you please also provide an image of the artifact after the reboot? – Sasha – 2018-08-13T12:47:12.133

my first guess was it was a faded QR code – hjpotter92 – 2018-08-13T15:40:21.363

@Sasha Great idea, if the artefact doesn't appear in the screenshot we can probably assume it's a GPU problem (assuming it's not a corrupted mouse cursor sprite, which wouldn't be captured by printscreen). – Clonkex – 2018-08-13T23:38:27.947

1@Clonkex, BTW, corrupted mouse cursor is a enough-highly-probable guess. – Sasha – 2018-08-14T07:24:57.567

Answers

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!

DrMoishe Pippik

Posted 2018-08-12T17:11:38.097

Reputation: 13 291

4I would also consider switching the computer off for a while to see if this is a memory overheat issue. – Ilia Nedoluzhko – 2018-08-13T00:16:57.243

3Given 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 – PlasmaHH – 2018-08-13T06:40:04.053

5Choosing "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. – Hitechcomputergeek – 2018-08-13T08:46:12.663

2@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. – Daniel F – 2018-08-13T10:50:04.483

@DanielF: If it is faulty memory, then it would need to repeat every 1366 pixels, which would really be an amazing coincidence – PlasmaHH – 2018-08-13T10:54:37.227

2@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. – Daniel F – 2018-08-13T11:05:22.807

1@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. – Wyzard – 2018-08-13T16:24:14.353

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. – Joshua – 2018-08-13T23:23:30.353

I would try a different screen resolution and if possible a different monitor.

If it only shows on one monitor then you know the monitor is the problem. And changing the screen resolution can have multiple outcomes. All will help to analyze the problem further.

Edgar

Posted 2018-08-12T17:11:38.097

Reputation: 269

2Technically I would say it's possible that a different monitor might not show the issue, but the issue might still be with the GPU. Imagine if the GPU's HDMI output was failing but its displayport output was fine. Or perhaps the GPU uses a different part of its memory when outputting a different resolution or with a different port. Not saying that's likely, just pointing out a possibility :) – Clonkex – 2018-08-14T06:51:54.023

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

Justin Time

Posted 2018-08-12T17:11:38.097

Reputation: 41