Gateway LCD Question (I think it's broken...)

I picked up my laptop tonight and low and behold, the monitor has a huge line of broken pixels (or at least I think). Then suddenly, the entire right 15% of the screen goes to black... ugh. About 25% of the screen is gone right now. My question is... is there anything I can do about this? Or will I have to buy a new LCD?

 

Is in under warranty?

 

Not at all

My partner was looking at it. He used to run a computer business, so he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. Anyway, he thinks that it's probably a faulty graphic card. He said that it's unlikely damaged pixels because the display is broken in lines in quite a uniform fashion. Sigh. the only plus is that I can still use the computer, minus 25% of the screen.

Anyway... I was looking up the Graphics card info and apparently it's integrated, which means no replacement without replacing the motherboard. He was also saying that there are PCMCIA graphics cards that you can set to override the main one, in some cases. Does anybody have experience with that? I'm not looking to spend a bunch of money. The computer is basically an internet/word processor for me. There was also a used model on eBay for $100 (minus adapter and disks, all of which I have), so I may just go that route instead.

 

I'm now pretty sure that it's the graphics card. The black band on the side disappeared and is now back to normal, minus the blurred band compromising about 15% of my screen.

My last question, I swear! Can I buy any PCI-graphics card and install it? Or does it have to be particular to my computer?

 

Graphics cards on notebooks cannot be upgraded in like 99% of notebooks. The first thing I would do is hook it up to an external monitor. That should tell you if it's the screen itself or the GPU/Motherboard.