HP Omen desktop PC displays odd pattern on screen, then crashes

Question

I have an HP Omen which I bought in January. It’s an HP Omen 870 with an Intel® Core™ i5-7600K processor, NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 graphics card 8 GB DDR4-2133 SDRAM, and a 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive which ran on Windows 10 Home 64. The full specs can be found on HP’s site here.

For the last couple of days it will suddenly display a weird pattern on the screen, switching to various color schemes and various patterns. The usual color is pink and blue, but sometimes it'll be green and red. I wasn't sure what it could have been so I started looking at the error reports.

All of the critical errors were app runtime errors with ID 79. I reset the apps that were involved and then disabled any other apps that were downloaded through the windows store. Worked for about five minutes; then it crashed again.

I decided to do a diagnostics scan on the hardware in case it was the graphics card, but it all came back clean. So from there I decided to try to reset the computer to its factory settings. What ended up happening was that it wouldn't let me reset it for whatever reason and then it rebooted to how it was prior to being reset. I tried one more time and this time what happened was not only did it wipe the drive I think it destroyed the OS on the Hard Drive.

My leading suspect is a virus of some sort. I am not certain. I tried running an antivirus but it would always crash before I got any results.

Again I do not suspect a hardware issue because of two reasons: any diagnostics scan would return passes for all the components and I would leave it on all night running multiple scans and there were no issues. I tried using a separate hard drive, one from an old laptop, I had but the same issue occurred.

I'm worried that whatever it is, it is a virus that has infected the motherboard. The following image shows what my screen looks like when it’s about to crash. Note that it does not always crash, but 90% of the time it does. Also the photo is taken while using my old laptop hard drive.

Answer 1

This is almost certainly some kind of hardware issue – most likely with the GPU. It is probable that this corruption is simply not being picked up with the scans/stress test (i.e., they are not triggering whatever is causing this issue).

Virii almost never infect motherboards (although this is theoretically possible). The thing is that it would be hard to do with little benefit to the attacker. [ If you are the target of a TLA, different story – but generally they will try and cover their tracks better. ]