T42 screen stripes+flickering

[bluppfisk]

Hey

It all started when I tried to plug my beamer into the VGA port. Though I hadn't used it for a while before I did that and I think I dropped my T42 some time before (it was in a laptop case but still it might have had a shock). So there could be two reasons why.

Anyway here's the problem. The laptop screen gets flickery (small brightness intensity flickers, no on-off) and the image is distorted with horizontal stripes (as if I applied the photoshop wind effect to it), and not stable so.

I can bend the bottom of my laptop slightly convex to fix the image, until I release it, or until shortly after releasing. It also seems to work when I press areas like the cardbus or harddisk area, or even the keyboard bevel quite hard. Although it may have something to do with the tilting of the laptop, which is a direct result of applying force to it or bending the laptop case. Tilting always seems to work, but it's very sensitive (40 degree angle might have stripes, 41 might be fine and 42 degrees will show stripes again) and the orientation that fixes the screen, never seems to be the same.

Another weird thing is that it never seems to happen within the first minute since power on, even though I tried provoking it by bending and tilting the laptop in all possible ways.

I've opened up the laptop, pulled out the screen connector and put it back in, thinking a loose connection was the culprit, but to no avail. The problem prevails.

Does anybody have any idea what could be the issue? I read about graphics card problems with the T42 when the user would hold the laptop by the palm rests, but I don't know if this might be related. At any rate, I'd be grateful for any tips, since this is the best laptop I've ever had, and they don't make them like this anymore...


Regards
bluppfisk

[RealBlackStuff]

Join the queue of people with a faulty/loose GPU.
Only solution is reballing the GPU or another motherboard.
See this posting about reballing in Europe: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=73945