See solution: bad stick of RAM!
I’ve bought a FW12 for a family member and I am seeing graphical corruption in a few places.
First, some background: I didn’t realize that this only took the small NVME drives (I had bought a normal-sized one), so we took out the tiny NVME they had in the current laptop (some old Dell thing, already installed with Windows 11) and put it in the FW12. AFAIK there were no issues with this drive or the Windows installation before.
(I am aware that you’re not supposed to just move around Windows like this, by the way!)
In the first few hours Windows seemed to work fine, save for some slowness that I chalked up to the driver installs and updates in progress.
However, this morning while finishing it up, the screen froze and threw up some minor corruption not too unlike (but much less than) what I experienced in this post on my FW13 AMD running KDE Debian (I didn’t take a picture at the time, this is just a visual example)
After a few more freezes (no corruption), we decided that I would backup some files and reinstall Windows. It would keep freezing and I eventually fell back to mounting the drive in LiveCD Kubuntu to do the backup & format, which passed with no issues at all.
Now that I am trying to run the Windows installer, I am consistently getting some bad corruption (two attempts so far). The patterns here are moving in that the horizontal bands across the checkerboard pattern are flickering
(in #2, a cursor is visible above all of the corruption, but it is not movable)
The fans seem to be going full blast (at least I think, I’ve held this machine for less than a day)
I am booting off of a Ventoy disk on an SD card (just what I had laying around) installing 24H2.
I’ll try burning Windows straight to the drive, and maybe a different version for now. I’ll be glad for any tips from you all, but I’ll only have the laptop for the weekends when I can come and help (or at least the NVME since we can’t get one right now).
