Screen goes grey and freezes frequently, makes it unusable

[fifa500]

On my laptop the screen would sometimes go fuzzy grey and freeze. I'm not sure how to explain exactly how to the screen goes but I'll try to explain it. On your TV you have your sky box or whatever plugged into the HDMI port but if you try and use the TV's built in freeview, which doesn't work as you haven't tuned it, then the screen looks grey and fuzzy (sorry if I haven't still managed to explain it well). That's what happens to my laptop screen, the screen turns grey and it freezes which forces me to turn it off. It's become much more frequent recently and I'm not sure what the problem is. My guess is that the laptop either has a failing hard drive, registry issues, overheating issues or RAM issues as I have installed new RAM to my laptop but the sticks aren't identical (I put them in a few months ago and there were no problems then, it has only been a recent occurence). My laptop is around 2 and a half years old if that's relevant. Thanks for taking your time to read and reply to this

 

[Karsten75]

On my laptop the screen would sometimes go fuzzy grey and freeze. I'm not sure how to explain exactly how to the screen goes but I'll try to explain it. On your TV you have your sky box or whatever plugged into the HDMI port but if you try and use the TV's built in freeview, which doesn't work as you haven't tuned it, then the screen looks grey and fuzzy (sorry if I haven't still managed to explain it well). That's what happens to my laptop screen, the screen turns grey and it freezes which forces me to turn it off. It's become much more frequent recently and I'm not sure what the problem is. My guess is that the laptop either has a failing hard drive, registry issues, overheating issues or RAM issues as I have installed new RAM to my laptop but the sticks aren't identical (I put them in a few months ago and there were no problems then, it has only been a recent occurence). My laptop is around 2 and a half years old if that's relevant. Thanks for taking your time to read and reply to this

There can be so many reasons. Try this first. If possible, connect the laptop to an external monitor (or TV screen). If the fuzzy screen happens on that monitor as well, then at least you can eliminate the monitor and all it's sub-components from your troubleshooting.

After that, try and remove the new memory.

Also see if you notice any temperature rises before this happens. It may be that when you installed the memory you bumped something and the thermal compound got damaged, although it doesn't sound like the most likely cause.

 

[fifa500]

The fuzzy screen still happens when connected to an external monitor. I haven't got any equipment or software to accurately judge the temperature but before it happens the laptop seems quite cool as the fans don't spin very fast. This has happened since I upgraded my laptop to windows 8 so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with it and on task manager it shows the disk usage as 100% a lot of the time so that could have something to do with it as well. Have you got any suggestions to which parts could be the problem as currently it looks like that any of the components could cause this problem.