Hi everyone,

People have been very helpful before on here so thank you.

I bought this Acer 5720g about 3 months ago. The only thing installed on it are Windows One Care and itunes, 20 or so mp3s and 30 or so jpegs and that's it. The laptop has 160gb HD and 2gb memory.

I was surfing the web yesterday and had 10 or so pages running. I left the laptop running these pages, went away for about 30mins to get something to eat, came back and the screen was black and displaying the following:

"DISPLAY ERROR: Error allocating memory
Wistron/Acer MXM M74M GDDR2 300e"

It shows the message every time I reboot and I cannot access windows even in safe mode! The laptop doesn't even appear to be "booting" and simply goes straight to this black screen and message within about 5 seconds of me booting up.

Any help guys? Thank you.

It looks like a video or memory problem. You might want to call acer tech support and see if you can ship it back and get it fixed.

Jim R

Try the BIOS. If you make it in there, clear the CMOS data.

Yeah it really sounds like the memory chip on your graphics card is bad (bad RAM if you have integrated graphics).

Replace the graphics card. If you don't have a graphics card installed, then replace the RAM. If there is more than one stick installed, remove 1 and try to boot. If you get the same error, reinstall the removed stick and remove the other stick and try to boot up. If it works, the chip you removed is bad (provided that you have integrated graphics [which uses RAM for the display]).

EDIT: Oops my post conflicted with Sabertooth's.

Hmm I wonder what happened to decency and morality? Doesn't anyone remember them?

Hi,

Many thanks for your quick replies.

Does anyone know what kind of work will have to be done to it then and how long do you reckon it will take?

Will my hard drive have to be reformatted (losing my mp3s, jpegs and One Care in the process) or is it a seperate issue that doesn't involve the hard drive?

Many thanks again.

It doesn't sound like a hard drive issue. If it's indeed the video card, it will take as long as it would to buy a new card and then install it (which takes a few minutes to install). You shouldn't lose your files.

Before you buy a graphics card you first have to find out what kind of socket the current graphics card is (most likely PCIe).

Hmm I wonder what happened to decency and morality? Doesn't anyone remember them?

So this is a laptop? I just googled the model you specified. Laptops usually have integrated graphics. Therefore, the RAM is most likely the culprit. According to the error you gave, it takes laptop DDR2 memory. If you replace the memory, it only takes a few minutes to install.

Hmm I wonder what happened to decency and morality? Doesn't anyone remember them?

Beginner1, Sabertooth and Rayburn- many thanks!

Rayburn,

the graphics card in my laptop is a
"ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT". What does this mean in relation to your advice?

Thanks.

According to Google, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT card uses dedicated memory, which means it uses its own RAM built onto the graphics card. Sorry about going back and forth with my opinion, but considering the graphics card has dedicated RAM, I would think that the RAM on the graphics card is bad. IMO, I think the laptop needs a new graphics card.

Hmm I wonder what happened to decency and morality? Doesn't anyone remember them?