Gateway MD2614U won't post...sometimes?

Good Morning all -

my buddy gave me his "broken" Gateway MD2614U laptop. For what it is it seems like a nice machine to give to my brother or mother. However, it was given to me for free at the price that it was broken.

I have experience building/fixing computers but I am unable to figure out what might be wrong here.... this is what it does:

Most of the time, when you hit the power button, the keyboard lights go on, the fan goes on inside, you can hear the CD drive click and check for a disc, however it seems to loop on the check (LCD will not light up to show POST or any information like that).

sometimes however, and I don't know the reason why, it will boot up and through, and show no signs of issues. From this point when this happens, I have been able to install windows and make it to the desktop. Then, for whatever reason, it might... freeze. The screen looks a bit distorted but locks up. At this point when turning it back on, it resumes the stuck booting process again until it decides to unfreeze. I haven't been able to link this to any sort of overheating (as the computer will do this loop even after a night of sitting).

I have tried vast searches and checking int to this for a month or two on my own, but I'm almost given up here. Is there any other sorts of checks I can do to try to locate what is going on here?

thanks for reading -Ross

 

looks like this is video card problem buddy....

 

A video card problem...sometimes? Any idea what would trigger it?

 

pull the network card, it happend to two of them that I had. Both were sent back to Gateway for "repair", this last one I just run a usb network card and it works fine