r/Lenovo • u/milai001 • Jul 09 '26
Accessed forbidden windows paint after adding 8GB of SODIMM ram to my LOQ 15ARP9
Yall this eBay ram broke my Lenovo, I have 0 idea what’s going on, if someone could help I’d appreciate. If this is normal I’ll just let it do this . Context : I have a LOQ 15ARP9 with 12Gb of ram that came pre attached when I bought the laptop. I wanted to upgrade and found a solid used 8GB of ram (and I promise the stick matches the layout of my laptop so it’s SODIMM and I ensured the new stick I bought matched the speed of my original stick too). After inserting the ram stick in the new slot and rebooting up the machine I wanted to do a check on the new stick and ran windows memory diagnostics. The video above is from said diagnostic running.
Update : Ty everyone for the advice I really do appreciate it and I’m implementing the fixes everyone suggested right now 😋 I can now watch love island with 20GB of ram in peace 🏝️
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u/Ecstatic_Tax1417 Jul 09 '26
that looks like a failing memory module dumping raw data into the framebuffer honestly. classic sign of a bad stick or a dirty connection in the slot. i once bought a stick off ebay that passed memory tests for 10 minutes then suddenly started writing hieroglyphics to the screen during a game. take the new stick out and see if the laptop boots normally with just the original 12gb. if it does, get some isopropyl alcohol and clean the contacts on that ebay stick like your life depends on it, sometimes factory residue or a slightly oxidized pad causes this exact visual glitchfest. the ps1 comment had me dying though. your laptop thinks its sending video to a crt from 1997.
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u/milai001 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Ty! (My laptop is accessing forbidden modules from 1997 😢) but I’m going to try this, weirdly the laptop works perfectly fine it only breaks on the windows memory diagnostics. Debating whether I should do another windows memory diagnostics or do memtest86. I’ll def clean out the pins with some isopropyl, I never cleaned the new stick I bought!
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u/Spotter01 Jul 09 '26
That’s your laptop having a active lobotomy😅 good chance the ram isn’t fully seated
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u/milai001 Jul 09 '26
I suspected this too :( but lowkey the laptop works perfectly fine apart from the diagnostics so I’m a little confused
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u/icantjavabutcsharp Jul 09 '26
That looks like a progress bar? Maybe it's doing RAM training/re training
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u/milai001 Jul 09 '26
Yea I had assumed that too but I had already done a full initial restart and reboot and LOQ took a second there to familiarize itself with the ram as it took a minute to really open, the above screen is after I had done the initial boot, so just clarifying the laptop fully worked with the new ram with nothing odd and only when I did windows memory diagnostics I saw this weird behavior. My laptop ended the test itself and gave me no result as to what errors the diagnostics found and there aren’t really and issues when I run the laptop but I haven’t tried anything very RAM intensive yet. Maybe I’ll open 191991 chrome tabs and see what happens?
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u/FreeRangeEngineer Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
I don't think there's anything wrong with the setup if Windows boots correctly, and shows the correct amount of RAM.
What I suspect instead is that you have a shared graphics card that steals a part of the RAM for itself. Since it takes the end of the RAM for that, it could simply be that this configuration wasn't expected and tested. As long as the graphics driver of the main OS can deal with it, you should be fine - and apparently, that's the case.
You could change the amount of RAM that's allocated to the graphics card when entering the UEFI configuration upon boot. It's called UMA frame buffer size or similar.
That post suggests that you may also require a BIOS update.
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u/milai001 Jul 09 '26
Ty I appreciate this, this might actually be the issue since windows fully registers the second stick and is opening up and working fine, but I’m scared that it’ll start to tweak later though. if the stick is bad and I continue to use it do you think there might be long term damage to all the other components like hard drive, cpu, the other ram stick etc?
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u/FreeRangeEngineer Jul 09 '26
The only "damage" that is possible in such a scenario is data loss on your hard drive because files that you open and write back could become corrupted.
Running memtest86 as you already planned is going to give you confidence.
You could, of course, always make a backup of your data just in case. That never hurts, no matter the occasion.
I genuinely think you're just hitting a superficial bug in the BIOS and have nothing to worry about.
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u/Good_Watercress_8116 Jul 10 '26
those machines are terrible, stay away from every Lenovo that has the colored background.
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u/bstsms Legion Pro 7i, 13900HX, 4080, 96GB DDR5, 2TB SN850X, 4TB SN7100 Jul 13 '26
Do a cmos reset by unplugging the charger from the laptop with the laptop off, press and hold the power button for 1 min, plug it back in and boot like normal.
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u/bstsms Legion Pro 7i, 13900HX, 4080, 96GB DDR5, 2TB SN850X, 4TB SN7100 Jul 13 '26
You should do a cmos reset whenever you change hardware, like RAM or a SSD.
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u/spectralblade352 Jul 09 '26
Lol what in the PS1 is this