HP Compaq nw8440: Really strange startup issues

So yesterday, I turned on my laptop like I usually do. But when it came up, the screen was split in two horizontally! I saw the HP logo on both the top half and the bottom half of the screen, along with the GRUB menu and the XP boot screen. Once my desktop came up, however, everything was fine!

At first I thought it was a fluke, since everything went well the rest of the day (including reboots and startups).

However, I went to start it up this morning, and the screen was COMPLETELY dead. I could tell the computer was still booting just fine (judging by the HD activity), but there was nothing on the screen, not even the backlight. So I hold the power button down for 5 seconds, reboot, and everything's fine again!

I haven't tried taking the battery out and holding the power button for 1 minute to reset everything yet, but does anyone have any ideas as to what may be causing this?

 

Well, I tried pulling the battery out and holding the power button down 1 minute, and so far, so good! The last several cold start-ups have been good!

Hopefully, those last two boots were just flukes...

 

UPDATE: Well, this has been happening for several months now, and over the summer, the problem starting happening much more frequenty-- basically, if my laptop had been on for more than 30 minutes, and you rebooted, the screen wouldn't come back up. Sometimes the external didn't even work. The backlight would flicker when logging into ubuntu.

So today, I finally took it in to my school's on-site help desk, and the problem turned out to be the LCD panel itself. Initially they thought it was the motherboard, but in the end, there was a controller in the LCD panel that was going out. So if you've had these problems, and a mobo replacement didn't work, try replacing the screen.

 

Thanks for sharing the experience. I think, the LCD died of statical discharge that gradually was building up in the system. Some parts a very sensitive to statics.
That's y I'd recommend doing the power drains as a part of routine maintenance.

 

You mean pulling the battery out and holding the power button for 15+ seconds?

 

Exactly. 10 char

 

I had tried that several times, but that wouldn't fix the problem. Now that it's fixed, I'll start doing that trick more often just to keep the static down.