Anyone have this P-172 FX screen issue?

Hey all,
I have had all kinds of problems with my gateway P-172 (same as the 6831). I have had it for almost two years and am miffed by how quickly their chat support wants you to wipe hard drives and send things in to get fixed. So most of my problems I have had to repair myself. Luckily, I have gone all two years without having to reformat C:

But I just got a sudden and debilitating screen issue. When i turn it on, the screen is flashing blue and white lines, and nothing is visible. The computer is working fine. I can see that the screen gets turquoise-ish when windows starts up, and I can here the windows sound when it opens, but I can't see anything.

Here is how it happened:
I was using the computer and the graphics got glitchy, and a window came up:
display driver failing. Then 30 seconds later a window came up saying the drivers were repaired. Then a minute later the screen turned black and locked up. When i tried to start it the screen did the flashing thing.

The next day when i turned it on, it was fine, but then windows woudn't start after login. I did a system restore and that fixed it. Then I was using it for an hour, and it crashed again.
Now everytime i start it, the same flashing screen stuff happens.
Anyone experience this? Either that or anyone have tips on how to speed up the repair process? thx

 

Can you still use the computer with an external monitor?

Have you been OCing your GPU?

When was the last time the machine was cleaned?

Have you recently disassembled the machine and maybe the panels cable is loose now?

 

thanks for the reply. External monitor sees no signal. The screen stays black and tthe power light intermittently flashes. I think its like its standby mode. I tried hittin fn f4 a bunch of times too.

I have never overclocked the thing, but I had a period where the GPU (8800) kept overheating and shutting the computer down at 104 c. Turned out the fan was just dirty. That was months ago though.

I have taken it apart once or twice, but the screen cable is VERY secure in there. I took it apart last night just to check. It hasn't been taken apart for about 4 or 5 months before the issue though. Last night when i cleaned it out there was very little dust. its crazy. like something in the Moboard or GPU could have gone maybe?

 

hrm... can you start in safemode? or will you not even get to see your BIOS flash screen due to the messed up screen?

If you can get into safe mofe you might be able to uninstall the nVidia driver to see if its just a corruption in the driver install. If it will run on the base VGA that the mobo has then its not the panel.

At that point you can install another driver (after using driver sweeper to remove all traces of nVidia from the system) to see if something just corrupted your original driver install

 

yeah no safe mode. it immediately begins with some washed out, color-cyclling lcd junk and then progresses into horizontal white and blue rolling bars. it sucks. you can tell that it is TRYING to display something. The mess gets a little blue-ish when windows comes up. Thats about it though. I had a sony Vaio, and then this, and I have had nothing but problems with this. Oh, and before it crapped out, the screen had 9 vertical dead pixel lines. Thats like 10000 dead pixels. .

 

hrm... do you still have any warrenty left?

It does sound like the GPU is offically dead. You can try reseating everything to make sure everythign is in correctly, but about the only chance to fix the GPU is cooking it in an oven (and with it soldered on the motherboard i'm not sure how well that will work)

Other than that its going to have to be swapped out by a tech.

Maybe someone else can come in and have another idea for you to try, but it sounds like a dead GPU to me. Sorry this isnt very good news