presario x6000 dying :(

Well, first off I've had my presario x6000 CTO for about 3 and a half years now, I bought it back when I worked at compusa and wanted a gaming laptop. Unfortunately, for the last 6 months my laptop has been dying, literally a week after my warranty expired.

First it started with colored vertical lines, now it has a huge blank vertical chunk of the screen that went out. Before the big black box of doom issue, I tried reformatting with a fresh copy of windows xp to no luck of removing the vertical lines, I also tried windows vista and still had the lines. After a bit of research it seems the lines are related to a cable issue or a video card issue. The laptop about 7 months ago started having heating problems, so now I keep a small desk fan blowing towards the back of the laptop where the heatsinks vent, since doing that it hasn't overheated and shut down once.

Anyways, I'll attach a picture of the problem and you guys can tell me how screwed I may or may not be. You can kinda see the colored vertical lines as well, theres about 25 of them across the entire screen.

Basic Specs:
3.6ghz process
2 gigs of ram
radeon x600m 256mb video card
windows xp sp2
17" widescreen bright view display.

Any information would be appreciated, I've done a hefty amount of searching and haven't found any fixes for the problem besides turning the laptop into a $2700 paperweight.

 

The only thing you can really do for yourself is to dismantle the computer and try reseating the video cable; or, you can try buying a replacement cable online (eBay is your best chance), but there is no guarantee that the problem is the video cable. Like you said, it could very well be the video card; if it is, the only option would be to replace the whole motherboard.

 

Plug it in an external monitor

If it shows up fine on the external monitor its your LCD screen/cable

If it shows up on the external monitor aswell then im afraid your gpu is toast.

It just sounds like the LCD/cable to me

 

^+1 agreed with Flipfire

BBGus

 

I also agree that this is most likely a problem with the internal cable. The cable is made to flex and it can crack after years of opening and closing the screen. Some of the wires have probably cracked and that part of the screen is not getting a signal anymore.

If you don't want to repair it yourself a local laptop should should be able to help you out. This type of repair should not be very expensive...

 

I would say it's time for a new notebook. That's just me. It looks like the LCD Inverter is going bad.

 

^ I disagree, unless the computer cannot meet your computing needs and/or the repair is too expensive, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to purchase a new laptop altogether.