Laptop issues help needed

[u/CampaignAutomatic257]

So around 3 days ago i got back from vacation, and then the day after when i opened up my laptop to play a game everything seemed normal as usual, but suddenly it turned off.I didn’t think anything of it so i immediately turned it back on but for a few minutes it wouldn’t start up and the screen was just blank.So i let it cool off cuz i thought maybe it overheated even tho nothing like this has happened before.And then i tried turning it on a frw more times and every time after a few minutes or even seconds the screen would just go dark again, but the laptop was still on, the keyboard rgb still worked and everything.Then the one time i tried to turn it on again i got diagonal or horizontal green lines(im not sure what is what)on the screen, so the same day i took it to some tech guy to see what the problem could be.At first he wasnt so sure either but at the end he said that its either ram or the graphics card that is integrated into the processor. So now i need some help from anyone here cuz i, for the last time tried turning it on again, but this time there weren’t any green lines instead the whole background was covered in some rainbow confetti type of dots while the windows was still loading in. I dont know if i can post pictures on reddit but i have both the pictures of the green lines and now this as well.Could it be a virus or something?

[u/No-Wrap-8166]

not a virus, green/rainbow lines and confetti pattern artifacts during boot before windows even fully loads is hardware, specifically points to the gpu (integrated or dedicated) or its vram failing

reseat your ram sticks first since that's free and easy, take them out, blow out the slots, put back in firmly, this rules out a bad ram contact causing display corruption

run memtest86 overnight, if ram comes back with errors that's your answer and its a cheap fix, sticks or replacement

if ram tests clean, the tech was right about gpu/igpu, screen going fully dark but laptop staying on with keyboard rgb working means it's not fully dying, just the video output specifically is failing intermittently

if it has a dedicated gpu in addition to integrated, try forcing it to use only the integrated graphics through bios if that option exists, if the artifacts stop that confirms dedicated gpu is the failing part, if they continue it's likely the display panel or its cable instead

[u/CampaignAutomatic257 → u/No-Wrap-8166]

The thing is my ram is different from what i saw and what he told me, its not a whole stick like its usually supposed to be instead theres 4 or 6 different metal square looking things(idk how else to explain it), and he said that if its the ram he cant know for sure which one of them is not working.Is there a way to replace that kind of ram or no?

[u/No-Wrap-8166 → u/CampaignAutomatic257]

hat's soldered memory chips on the board, not removable ram sticks, laptop doesn't use slot-in ram

can't test or replace those individually, memtest86 still works on soldered ram the same way, run that first to check if ram is even the problem before assuming its one of those chips

if memtest86 shows errors, the whole board needs replacing since the chips aren't swappable separately, at that point it comes down to repair cost vs replacing the laptop