Perplexing problem with 8510p

Okay so I have this 8510p with the 1680x1050 screen. Its been a great computer, and have only had it for about 5 months.

All of a sudden one day weird characters fill the screen on boot up between the bios start up and windows start up. Basically the screen is filled with 8-10 characters then a space, repeated over and over again. Some of the characters randomly change. And now I have a dotted line of red pixels flashing on the top of my screen. the line is about 20 pixels high and about an inch from the top of the screen.

More weirdly is that the flashing is happening in time to any activity on the computer. I am a network engineer and have worked my way up through small computer support but I have never seen anything like this before.

So when the computer is totally inactive the screen is great.

Is the inventor in the screen going bad? Or is it my installation of vista 64?

I don't think its the windows installation because I can see some weird video characters before windows even starts up. I have tried to reinstall the video drivers and most of the other drivers with no effect.

I am just totally baffled by this problem. Anyone have any ideas?

 

HA! I don't think it's the 'inventor' of the screen that's bad. Plug an external screen into it and see if the problem appears there; if it does, it's obviously video adapter related (drivers or hardware). If not, then it's your laptop display. That should at least get you started.

 

Thank you very much! I didn't think of that.

I will try that out and post what I find out. Its a really annoying having the screen acting like this