One of the oddities I tend to have with technology is that if I see something I really like, I tend to purchase more than one. Case in point of a cheap (and embarrassingly underpowered) Dell Latitude just for travel and SRB2 gaming/development. Every time I turned on the second one the Dell logo would corrupt right before getting into Windows and it was bothering the heck out of me.

Did all the basic troubleshooting steps, though for whatever reason I am unable to update the machine fully, so as a last ditch effort decided to boot both into BIOS and check every single setting between the two machines. It turns out, by default, the new one has the POST mode set to minimal rather than thorough to which I changed it and the corruption disappears.

Now to wait for Windows Update to unlock, though it shouldn't take too long since it has Intel GPU drivers version 30.