A very strange display problem on my laptop.

toiletninja

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Aug 27, 2007
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18,510
I hope you guys can help. (I am using my computer right now) Yesterday morning my laptop (running on vista) was working just fine. I checked my email, and then I set it to hibernate. I always put my laptop to hibernate, as doing a full startup takes more time. That evening I turned it back on and I immediately noticed something was wrong. I don't remember well, but I was looking at an error page, and I think it had something to do with memory. I force-shutdowned the laptop and then restarted. Then I couldn't even describe what I was seeing in words so I decided to film this morning to show what it looks like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HesyOKsqX8s

(yes you can see my reflection in the beginning) That resolution is MUCH lower than what I had before (1280x800) and the colors are much lower as well. There are weird lines across the screen, and also, notice the error I receive.

I have tried (since the laptop still has some functionality):

-Setting display settings back to 1280x800 and 32 colors. when I press "ok", the window "do you want to keep these display settings" pops up but it is as if I didn't do anything. Same resolution and color.

-Restarting multiple times (including safe mode) and got same results.

-Removing the battery. Same results.

-Uninstalling display driver and reinstalling. (nvidia geforce 8400m gt) Nothing happened. (I uninstalled, restarted, and after I turned it back on the computer automatically installed the driver for me after a popup: "detecting driver software" or something)

-System restore to 6 days ago (when I first started up my laptop, a bubble came up saying "windows has installed new updates" so I put the restore point past before the previous one). Did not fix.

-Running full scan from AVG. Found nothing.

I have no clue what is going on with my laptop. Help will be greatly appreciated.
 
Solution
See if using an external monitor will remove the lines.

Else, your GPU is damaged. The 8400 and 8600 chips are known to have a manufacturing defect that causes this. You may need a new motherboard.

toiletninja

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Aug 27, 2007
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Connecting it to an external monitor did not work. It was not even detected.

How can I go about fixing this? Do I really need to replace the whole motherboard or just the gpu?
 

frozenlead

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That depends on if your GPU is a separate board or not...and even if it is, finding a replacement one is very difficult.

There's no real way to fix this. You can try resoldering and heating and reballing, etc - but I've never known any of them to work.