Broken....what?

Specs:
Windows XP
E1705 Dell Inspiron Laptop
[email protected]
2.00GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS with latest Forceware drivers

Hopefully someone can shed some light on what's wrong. I'm not exactly sure how to explain what's wrong so instead I've uploaded an image which shows the problem when I use print screen.



What I did in that picture was take a blank txt file and just move it around in circles for about 30 seconds. As you can see I collection of miscolored pixels appeared. Basically imagine a couple spots on your display that whenever you drag something around over them they leave a trail of random colors. It can get annoying in IE when I scroll down websites and all of a sudden I have vertical trailing lines of miscolored pixels.

But that's not all. When I startup and have, for instance, a black screen with the windows logo, there will be all kinds of miscolored pixels all over the screen. Last night I reinstalled/updated my video card drivers and I noticed some of the text when entering safe mode (when it's still in DOS) would be miscolored or sometimes just be the wrong letter (for instance "Please" was spelled "P,ease"). Another example when I start up on one screen it should say at the top "www.dell.com". This morning it said "pww.dell.com". Just weird stuff like that.

I can't play graphics intense games because I always get an nvidia display error or blue screen. It seems like the problem intensifies when the laptop gets hotter.

I've been tolerating this problem for a couple months now but it seems to be getting worse. I intially thought it was the video card, but even after I completely uninstalled drivers and was running in safe mode last night I was getting wierd text "messups" in DOS mode. I'm beginning to think it is a RAM or motherboard problem.

Also I reformatted about a month ago which didn't fix the problem.

I think that's about it. At this point I'm thinking something must have overheated. Any ideas?

 

Have you looked for any updated drivers?

 

My best guess is your inverter cable is loose. Check the connection from your motherboard to the screen.

 

Inverter cable problems should not show up in 'print screen' snapshots, or am I wrong?

 

hmm... could be.. but i'm not 100% certain. It doesn't hurt to try, but if that still doesn't solve your problem, I would call dell and ask them for a solution.

 

If that is a snapshot, its gotta be a problem with drivers, RAM, or the GPU.

 

the same thing happened to my e1705 before it crapped out on me. i'm not sure what went wrong though, my guess is the video card burning out/overheating.


when i had that, my laptop was at the stage where it can't boot vista, and when i boot into ubuntu, i get the weird colored pxiel things you have in your screenshot but the pixel thing never appeared in xp.

 

i had a problem like this once but it was worse for me all the colours on my screen inverted, i did a virus scan and found a few i removed them and my screen was back to normal. so do a virus scan with a fully updated antivirus
it may help. good luck

 

I think it's because of that Zune icon on your desktop!