A green bar across the screen

Hello there.

There's a green vertical bar close to the right border of my screen. It appeared without asking permission and apparently it has decided to stay there forever. Is this very serious? Is it going to get worse really fast? Should I go ahead and buy a Qosmio, just as a precaution?

As I said on another thread, I have a 4-year-old Toshiba Satellite P105-S9312 and I took it recently (in August, I think) to a repair shop. It froze and several horizontal bars appeared across the screen (thick and blurry, not like the thin vertical line I got now). I thought it was a problem with the video card, but it turned out to be a problem with the video chipset and a faulty connection with the motherboard. When my computer froze back then, I tried to restart it but it froze again and it wouldn't go beyond that scrolling bar with the Windows XP logo. However, it would boot in safe mode and everything looked normal, which made me think the screen was fine and the problem was the video card. If I boot my computer in safe mode now, the green line is still there. The line is not always there; it disappears when there is a white background in that part of the screen (when I open a web browser or a word document, for example). How can I know if this is a problem with the LCD or with the video chipset?

The line doesn't really bother me (it's very thin, as I said), but I am little bit worried. How can I make it worse, so even my wife would agree that I need a new computer? Ooops, sorry. I meant, How can I make it go away? And make it look like an accident?

Does any of you have experience with this kind of problem? It's probably the LCD, right?

Thanks!

 

Hello there! Do you have tried a external monitor?

 

No, I don't have an external monitor at hand. But that's a great idea, I'll try to do it next week. Thanks!

 

No problem mate, just let me know how it works out for you. And, we can try to find another solution if it does not work...

 

Now a there's another line, a pink one. It looks like my screen is slowly becoming a Christmas tree.

I still haven't had a chance to connect the laptop to an external monitor. I am new to this town, so I can't ask this favor to a friend. I am pretty sure I have a cable somewhere to connect the laptop to a TV, but it must be in one of the unpacked boxes, because I don't see it anywhere. Oh well.

 

LOL

Well, back to the problem. It could be your LCD screen, does they appear/dissapear when you close/open the lid? My cousin had de same on her laptop, and when you slowly and carefully bend the screen to left and right some new appeard and some of they dissapeard.

Do you got the same result?

 

Oooops, sorry for the late reply. No, I don't get the same result. The lines stay there all the time.

Well, the screen just became unusable. It has an enormous black bar in the middle of the screen and the colors became distorted. Very unpleasant. The machine still runs normally. I am sad because I think it's far from outdated (sure, it can't run the latest games, but I don't have time to play them anyway). Anyway, it has had several problems in the las few months and I am not going to invest in another repair. It's not reliable anymore. I just bought a netbook this week and I am very happy with it (the Toshiba T215D), but I didn't expect it to be my main computer for several months. Oh well, I can't afford a replacement right now. Hopefully I'll only have to wait until the spring.

By the way, since I couldn't connect the laptop to an external monitor it ocurred to me that there is another method to check if it's an LCD problem: to take a screenshot. I did and the lines were nowhere to be seen in that image.

Thanks again for your help, tuηay.