SYSTEM:
Dell Inspiron 8500 (2GHz), nvidia GeForce 4 Go (Dell Mobile 64MB), WinXP Professional SP2, about 5 years old.
WHAT HAPPENED:
While playing a racing game with my laptop, the screen got garbled with colored dots and the game froze.
SYMPTOMS:
When restarting, the LCD screen would display flickering, vertical, random-like lines in different colors. These lines would appear as soon as the BIOS screen appeared.
In Windows, I had to disable the video adapter, otherwise the screen would go black. Also, changing the resolution would sometimes cause the system to shut down by itself.
Sometimes when starting up Windows, the color quality would automatically be set to 4 bits (really bad). When changing this to 16 bit, it would sometimes change correctly, sometimes not.
TESTED:
I plugged an external monitor to the laptop, which also displayed the lines. Also had a look at the nvidia adapter in the laptop and could not find any physical defects.
CONCLUSION:
From this, I conclude that the LCD screen is fine, there must be something wrong with the graphics processing.
QUESTION:
Does anyone know what part is wrong with my laptop? Is the nvidia graphics adapter at fault? Or the motherboard? Because when disabling the nvidia adapter in My Computer, the problem still persists. However, when enabling the adapter in My Computer, the screen goes completely black and I have to restart in Safe Mode to disable it again.
If it’s just the adapter which is faulty, I can just buy a new adapter and replace it myself. However, if it’s the motherboard which has a problem, I would have to send it in for repair.
Thank you for your patience.
