Laptop woes - Black background is now pure red.
This happened over the last couple of days. on a laptop that spends all
its time on a desk .. didn't drop it, spill fluids or anything.
The LCD is about a year old and so the cfl has only c. 1000 hours.
If I leave the laptop to cool off for a while and boot, everything is
fine - display is nice & crisp, no funny colors or anything.
As the laptop warms up, I begin to see some red flashes when I'm typing
something on a black background.
When acpi reports a temperature of 60C or thereabout, the bright red
becomes permanent and what I'm typing - normally light grey on black, is
pretty much illegible.
60C is not hot on this laptop: the fan only starts up when it reaches a
termperature of 74C.
When that happens, pretty much the only thing that is nice and crisp is
reverse video stuff such as my root prompt or visuual selections in vim.
If I switch to a light background such as google search in mozilla, the
background has a bluish/greenish tinge in most places - more like
shadows than a uniform color.. also, it flickers.
I have reseated the video cable to no effect - I vaguely suspect the
video card - an ATI Mach64 might be the culprit.
Before I start bying new parts, I was wondering if anyone has
experienced anything similar to this.
As you can imagine, since I don't have another machine available at
this point, I have not googled much for solutions :-)
In fact, on-screen stuff is so bad that I'm having a hard time reading
what I just typed.
To clarify, I have uploaded a few screenshots at:
www.geocities.com/fcky1000/fckw/
Thanks,
CJ
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