Alienware 17 P18E Screen Distortion/Glitching

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Dani87

PCHF Member
Sep 9, 2021
3
1
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This laptop was given to me secondhand a few years ago and I'm not very technologically-literate, so please be patient with me - I'll try to explain the issue as best I can.

My screen started glitching (thin lines and boxes) a couple of weeks ago and a video error appeared before the computer shut itself down. I can't remember the exact error message. This kept happening (minus the error message, that only appeared the first time) for several days before I gave up and completely wiped the drives, reinstalled windows 10 and updated the drivers. It seemed to be working fine for a while, doing basic things like email and watching YouTube videos. But the glitching happened again today. I ran pre boot diagnostics and everything came back fine (the screen was all messed up WHILE the message popped up saying everything was fine lol), and I ran a hardware scan through Dell's SupportAssist app and everything came back fine there too. Another weird and probably related issue - sometimes when I shut the computer down, the screen will go black but the Alienware logo and keyboard will stay illuminated and the touchpad will light up when I touch it. So I have to do a hard shut down to actually get it to turn off.

I have no idea what the issue is. If its hardware, why aren't these tests showing up with any issues?

Pretty sure the below details are correct:

2.9GHz processor
Intel Core i7-4910MQ
NVidia GeForce GTX 880M
32GB RAM
250GB SSD
1TB HDD
Windows 10
 
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