My Gateway laptop is having the following symptoms:
1) BIOS "welcom" screen: Vertical dotted/dashed lines ONLY found in the left side of the screen.
2) Before windows boots: Random characters everywhere glitching and warping characters.
3) Windows XP welcome screen: Dotted vertical lines distributed everywhere.
4) Windows Desktop: Some icons (escpecially white ones) look corrupted;
Dotted vertical lines everywhere. Right click menu window leaves a
"ghostly shadow" of more distinguished dotted vertical lines.
5) At times there will be a static signal flicker: Dots changes color
or randomly disappears. This static happens if there is no physical
movements or if it is just idling.
6) Sometimes it fixes itself but it still leaves a matrix of dots. Pressing F5 (Refresh) or resizing windows or taskbar cleans the matrix.
7) Physically smacking the laptop sometimes reproduces symptoms 5 and 6, eg. smacking it fixes the vertical lines.
8) If the laptop is displaying normaly (ie, no dotted lines), opening
3d games or application often reproduces symptoms 4-7, and either
disappears at reboot or reproduces all the symptoms.
This problem has happened 3 times already. Laptop has been service by
the warranty and they say they replaced the MoBo. I could conclude that
this symptoms can be a defective mobo memory or a loose connection. I
want to know how to locate such problem in the laptop so i could fix
this myself after my warranty expires.
Tags: