Laptop White Screen

[sactoking]

I was watching a movie on my laptop recently when it crashed. The laptop rebooted and recovered to Windows (XP) in Normal mode, but was running a bit sluggishly. The crash screen from Windows indicated it was a video driver problem. I shut the laptop down without doing ANYTHING. Now, when it boots, the video is all messed up. The screen starts out completely white and slowly fades to black with green vertical lines. After a bit, the screen goes completely blue.

I've figured out that it's booting fine, as the white screen occurs when the screen used to show the Windows logo in black and white, it has the black screen with green lines during the rest of the bootup, and goes blue at what used to be the login screen.

My question is: what happened? If the hardware crashed, why did it display properly on recovery and not later? If it's software, why won't my boot disk solve anything?

Unfortunately, the warranty just expired. Is some part fried?

 

[MichaelD]

Try connecting an external monitor and see if it's normal. If it is, your screen is messed up. If it's not normal, then most likely the video card/chip on the laptop is fried.

 

[corkyg]

Try MichaelD's external monitor suggestion. That can tell you if it is your LCD on the laptop (failing inverter or backlight). If the problem shows on the external, then it points to your laptop's video controller. My suspicion it is your laptop LCD's inverter going South.

 

[sactoking]

Ah, thank you! I don't know why I didn't think of that. Sometimes I forget that laptops can be more than just laptops.

 

[sactoking]

So, I plugged the lappy into the CRT. All of the startup screens had vertical green lines through them, but the login and desktop rendered fine. It appears to be a screen problem on the laptop, which I believe should be easier to fix than to buy a new one. Thank you for the help!