Thinkpads Forum

My apologies - I suspect this topic has been covered before more than a few times - sigh. Anyway, my T61 (model 8889 with SXGA screen plus Nvidia GPU) has developed some display issues. The screen now comes up with horizonal orange lines and some flickering black vertical lines. However when I take a screenshot of the display or pipe the display out to an external monitor via a VGA cable things look fine. So I assume I do not have the dreaded Nvidia GPU problem. My suspicion is that its a video cable problem (bad connection or bad cable?) I'm quite willing to take the whole display apart to investigate - I've done so on another machine when I upgraded that machine from an XGA to SXGA lcd. Is that the first thing I should do, or is there something else I should be looking at first? Thanks!

twillis449 wrote:However when I take a screenshot of the display or pipe the display out to an external monitor via a VGA cable things look fine. So I assume I do not have the dreaded Nvidia GPU problem. My suspicion is that its a video cable problem (bad connection or bad cable?)

I'd be banking on nVidia GPU going south or a *very* unusual LCD failure.

The fact that you're running clean to an external LCD means next to nothing: there are two separate outputs from the GPU: analog for VGA and digital for LCD. One can work well while the other one is completely down...

There's no harm in resetting all the connections, and possibly trying another cable, although I'd personally be more tempted to try another screen.

Good luck.

So, your NV GPU must be good. It may be the problem of your LCD. Please test the LCD by Ntest.exe(a screen tester) and give me reply.

jbcdidgosir wrote:So, your NV GPU must be good. It may be the problem of your LCD. Please test the LCD by Ntest.exe(a screen tester) and give me reply.

You haven't bothered reading my post which is right above yours, have you?

Since you have another thinkpad, you can try swapping lids. Any T60 or T61 lid will work, if it's not the same size screen you can still plug in the cable and test.

Your nvs140m graphics does sometimes fail with graphic artifacts, but they usually don't follow horizonal or vertical patterns, they are more random, but just because 999 fail one way doesn't mean 1 can't fail differently, so don't assume it's good until you can see it work how it should on a known good panel.