Old laptop with WinXP Pro weird screen behavior...

I have an older Gateway with XP Pro... and up until recently it was working a-okay. Now, seemingly randomly, the screen shifts very quickly, and then all of a sudden pixellates and/or goes to random colors... sometimes in lines, sometimes flashing between red, green, and blue. Here's what I've done so far to try and fix it:

1) uninstall graphics driver - now using stock MS driver
2) turn off ALL click boxes in the appearance/enhancement XP menu
3) tried adjusting color depth, resolution and other settings while screen is messed up (barely readable by the way, very hard to see anything)
4) uninstalling any unnecessary program (all that is loaded is Adobe acrobat and MS word)
5) turning off the startup of all non-essential programs via msconfig
6) running in safe mode - still happens

This seems to be a software issue because the boot screen and everything loads fine... sometimes the Win XP logo on the startup screen is a little distorted though. I am completely lost on this one, I'm going to reinstall windows if that's the last resort.

 

May be the graphics card is failing *slowly*?!?!!!!

Can't think of anything else ATM, since you have pretty much checked out everything possible, I think...

 

I'm not sure... the laptop is old, but it never seems to overheat or anything. It always happens a few minutes after it turns on, regardless if it's been on shortly before or not. The fan rarely comes on.

 

Sounds like either the graphics card is dying, or possibly the cable connecting the screen to the motherboard or, possibly, the inverter. If it's something like a hairline fracture in a wire, the problem may not manifest itself until those components get up to normal operating temperature, which might explain why the boot screen displays fine but everything else thereafter is getting messed up.

 

Would it help if I tried to boot-load Ubuntu to see if it is windows causing the problems, or if it is a hardware issue?

 

Could it be that the battery charger I'm using doesn't have enough output to charge the battery (from a different model Gateway, same company)? I've been using this battery charger for a good month now with no problems...

 

That would probably be pretty useful if you booted from a liveCD (you could also get an iso of TheUltimateBootCD and do the same thing (UBCD is dos-based; there's also a Windows-based version, but I've not played around with that so far).

If the liveCD boots fine and the visuals play nice with the system running for a couple of hours, then you've almost certainly got a software problem in your Win installation; conversely, if you still get the visual problems, then it's almost certainly a hardware problem.

 

Booted Ubuntu and had the same problems after a while... once the screen geeked out I tried flexing the laptop around where the screen meets the computer and it changed the problem around... made new colors or new distortions. However, the problem manifested itself in the first place when the computer wasn't even touched... any more ideas?