Dell Laptop screen Showing Weird Distortion? Bad Video Card? Bad LCD?

[metroplex]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500.

I did not overclock the card. It has run relatively stock for a long time.

Now I find the screen starts to get garbled like as if you were using a video card where the RAM was shot to hell from being overclocked or overvolted. What was interesting is that the display gets really bad either in the DOS or Windows environment especially when you open/close the screen/lid.

I suspected the cable might be bad but opening it up revealed nothing that was physically broken.

Is this a known problem? How do I fix it?

Is it time for a new video card or a new laptop screen?

 

[piasabird]

Video card or integrated video adapter is probably going bad.

 

[metroplex]

Is it the screen? I can't see how a bad connector to the screen will cause this type of garbling which looks a lot like memory/core failure (I burned out a GeForce 3 and saw this when playing 3D games).

I looked at eBay prices and it seems $85-$90 is the going price for a replacement Radeon 7500. I cannot fathom paying close to $100 for an outdated POS video card for my outdated laptop.

 

[metroplex]

So far so good. It appears the keyboard wasn't tightened down properly. How is this important?

The keyboard acts as a heatsink for the GPU... don't ask me WHY but that's how Dell did it. There's an aluminum panel under the keyboard that has a raised portion that contacts the "heatsink" of the GPU. THere's a copper heat pipe to spread out the heat under the keyboard.

 

[metroplex]

Nope, that wasn't it.

 

[metroplex]

I plugged in a CRT to the VGA port and the garbling shows up there as well.

Does it sound like the video card is bad? I just want to know before shelling out $$$ for a Dell Inspiron only video card.