Dell inspiron 4gb vista home premium. Fully patched & full paid for antivirus etc.

I know a bit bout what i' doing but am baffled. Last week laptop crashed with jagged lines accross the screen. Could get into safe mode & backed of all necessary. Could not recover to a restore point & only solution was a complete reinstall. Fine for a week & same thin happened. I have ran diagnostics & no hardware issues apparent. No recent software installations etc. No idea!

If it happens again I think I'll be asking swmbo for a new laptop!

Sounds like a gfx driver issue, or possibly the gfx chip itself is borked.

I would say GFX chip/memory is dying.

Are the temperatures high?

Have you added any RAM to it?

Could you take that out (back to 'as bought') & try running it for a while?

Try Memtest86.

If its within 12month warrenty send back to dell for repair

I agree with gfx. Dad upgraded his dell via win update or dells help app and had similar issues. A roll back to the prev driver resolved everything.

Spot on folks - GFX it was. Rolled back to original drivers & so far (famous last words) all seems ok. Thanks for the help.

Sometimes people are too quick to reformat before checking things.

Glad you got sorted, but valued lesson learned.

For info - spoke too soon. Motherboard fnacked. Now have nice shiny new HP laptop (£200.00 off as I now work for HP - took us over).

*makes mental note when to get cheap HP stuff*

Which HP is it?

I think thats a common fault on the inspirons. I had a mate with an inspiron 1525 and the same thing happened but not all the time. I checked on the Dell support site and he was within his waranty by a week so i made a warranty claim. It got uplifted, new motherboard fitted and returned with an extra 3 month manufacturers warranty.

HDX HX16 HP HDX X16-1310EA Premium Notebook PC (NW739EA) specifications - HP Home & Home Office products

Cost £800.00.

Had the Dell >3 years & cannot grumble. No issues in that time. 4 months out of warranty when it when t*ts up. Still I managed to pursuade swmbo that I couldn't repair it & a new one was 'necessary'.

Laptop will be appearing on fleabay in the near future providing I can source a reasonable mboard.