Be Excellent To Each Other

Evening, all!

So I've got this horizontal white line covering half* of the taskbar at the bottom of my screen, and a vertical line about 3cm wide running down the middle of the screen, which isn't actually opaque but just whiter than the rest of it. The lines are constant and don't waiver when I fidget about with the screen.

The lappy's taken a few knocks over the past month or so, and one side of the case isn't stuck together properly any more, but I'm not sure how relevant these factors are. I can't really afford to have anything repaired at the moment, so I was just wondering if there's anything I could do myself. Any ideas, or am I out of luck?

Cheers, folks.

*It runs the full width of the screen, but is only about half a centimeter wide.

I'm not well up on laptops, but I guess the steps to take are:
1. I'm assuming it's definitely the screen - the lines are always there, not just in windows?
2. Can you hook it up to an external monitor, just to make sure it is the screen and not the graphics chip.
3. Get on ebay and see if you can pick up a replacement screen - you might want to see if you can get hold of a service manual as well as that'll tell you how to replace the screen.

Cheers, mate. The lines are always there during booting up and shutting down, etc. I'll try hooking it up to my PC monitor if I can.

I don't think it's the graphics chip, as these lines don't affect screenshots I've taken, when I move them into the good areas of the screen. Or would they not do that anyway?

I didn't even think of that, yeah if the lines don't show up when you take a screenshot then you can pretty much guarantee it's the screen.

It might just be the VGA cable that runs through the hinges. We had a glut of bad Samsungs that we forced them to do a product recall on due to dodgy cables.

Photo please. We might be able to diagnose if it's an LCD problem or a cable problem that way.

Nah, a screenshot is a shot of what should be on the screen, your GFX card has nowt to do with it.

Surely the gfx card is what's telling the pc what should be on the screen?

No, other way round. The PC tells the GFX card what to display, and it displays it.
I think. I don't know now.

If the screenshot shows corruption, it's not the screen hardware.

If it screenshot doesn't, it is the screen hardware.

Anything else cannot be reliably determined from a screenshot, really.

I never really thought about it to be honest. I know the cpu will tell the GFX card what to display, but I assumed if the card was knackered, then a screenshot would show what the GFX card put out, rather than the cpu intervening and printing what should be there. Why couldn't it correct the display on the monitor as well?

I think Grim...'s right.

Yeah, he is - just tested it by wanking my gfx card settings, taking a screenshot, then fixing it. The screenie was fine.

**preens**

Well, you live and learn.