Weird Laptop Problem, No idea what to do, please help!

Hi everyone, I have a dell inspiron 9400.
Last day I was using my laptop, and as I was surfing the internet it started changing colour. There was tiny pixels of orange and yellow covering it in a pattern across the screen. Then, everything froze, and the laptop screen went black. I tried rebooting, and it goes into the splash screen with up and down pixelation, afterwhich it shows the loading screen with the windows icon, and that has some discolouration as well. Then, upon booting into the OS, the screen shows some garbaled text, and then turns off (i think the backlight is on). I heard a sound coming from it after a while (the windows logon sound).

I tried connecting it to an external moitor, but I think I need to input a function to transmit to it (anyone know what it is?). On top of all this, my internet was gone at the same time. So there was no way I could look for a solution online. As well, my router was telling me that the network password was changed and it reverted back to the default. Could this have been a hacker attack? I then called my internet company, and told them my modem wasn't getting a signal, but they said everything was fine in my area (usually resetting the modem or disconnecting/reconnecting it works).

Finally I went into safe mode, which worked, so I was able to back up some of my files. There is still tiny yellow-orange pixels running across the screen. I decided to try restoring the system to an earlier state, but that didin't work. Then I did an entire system restore to default settings. Nope. Still the same issue, in fact, I had to hard reboot during the restore because the monitor turned off (god knows what's going on with the OS right now).

It's a rather expensive laptop, and it's been only 2 years since I got it. I'm thinking it may be the video card, but I don't want to a buy a replacement before I know for sure. I'm pretty competent when it comes to electronics, so if anyone has any suggestions that involve opening the laptop up please advise me.

Thanks for reading, as you can see I'm without a laptop and without internet for a bit and any help would be much appreciated.

 

It sounds like a classic, graphics card died scenario.
Hopefully you still have warranty?
if so, ring Dell they'll replace the motherboard/gpu.

I don't what you would really see if anything from a electrical or even visual look under the hood.

 

It does sound like a hardware fail. Glad you got data backed up.

As far as the Safe Mode thing goes, that's probably because it loaded only the most basic graphics drivers.

As was mentioned, hopefully you're still under Dell warranty.

 

It sounds like the graphics card to me too. Is it still under warranty?

 

It's not under warranty, it's been 2 years and I've only had a year warranty on it. I've ran some tests, and it seems the hard drive is failing during the stress tests. There is garbled text all over the screen when booting up this program called "Hiren's Boot CD". Any other reason's there would be garbled text? I dont think it's the graphics card.

 

- Can you boot into windows?
- Garbled text - can you post a screen shot. It would seriously help deciding what the problem is. Does your screen look like the attached?

 

That's fairly close. I get the same pixelation patterns, but no straight up and down lines. Also, more characters get replaced by random ones. I will post a pic later on, but thank you very much for paying attention to my problem.
cheers

 

Sorry to say it, but that is a fried graphics card standing on its last legs.

The artifacting (sign of gpu dying) varies from lines down the screen to fuzzy dots apearing randomly (usually around text or pictures outlines) basically anything that shouldn't be on the display normally like that signifies a gpu problem.

Given that you said your hdd is also experiencing problems, and as you're no longer covered under warranty, you're probably going to be looking at buying a new computer sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

If you really don't think its the graphics card, you could either run the diagnostics at start up (as you did with the hdd)
or if you can boot into windows long enough (with safe mode) you could try to disable the gpu card (it'l then use software graphics rendering) and you could then test the other pieces of hardware to see which bit has failed.

 

Hey,
Due to the faulty system restore, I don't even have a safe mode anymore. I tried disabling the media card on boot, but I don't think that's the GPU. Any way I can disable the video card without logging into windows? I decided to take apart the laptop today and take it out manually because I couldn't find out how to do it. I got as far as taking off the front cover and keyboard, but then I looked at the amount of effort required to disconnect the display and gave up. I'll probably call dell at some point and talk to technical support (not as hopeless as you think, it was bought from business/university division).
cheers

 

You are pretty much screwed. If the laptop is using a nvidia or ati daughterboard based video card, replacement isn't to hard. If its using the motherboard chipset for video, a motherboard replacement may just not be worth it.

Your data isn't lost though, if you really need it now, goto your local electronics retailer and buy an external drive enclosure that supports laptop hard drives, yank it, and then plug the enclosure into a desktop USB port.

 

bump for any other ideas?