T520 Display issue horizontal lines + image is jumping

[spol]

Hi

My T520 has all of a sudden got an issue with the display.
It is showing a lot of horizontal lines and the image is jumping like it is missing sync.
The image is fine on an external monitor.
I have recorded a short video of the issue here: https://youtu.be/zLyv4TWDjMI
Any suggestions of things to check or the nature of the issue?

Thanks
Tom

[dr_st]

Hello, Tom, and welcome to the forum.

Sorry to hear about your trouble.

First make sure all connectors are tight. If that does not help - the screen may be busted or it can be the cable.I would try to replace one of them - whichever is easier for you to obtain - and if that does not work - then the other one.

[kfzhu1229]

This looks like to me more like a display cable issue. Reseat the cable on all ends, but REMOVE the battery first! If you don't remove the battery to do this on a thinkpad, you blow the backlight fuse, full stop.
I guess the more rare situation would be a failing GPU. Not likely on a T520 but not impossible. On another one of those unsafe NVIdia NVS140M chips, I had this symptom where the internal display behaves similar to that and the external display displays a much more readable corruption, and that's probably because the 2nd channel of LVDS connection was faulty on that chip, and my internal monitor is a high res one that requires the 2nd channel, while the external monitor is just SXGA. (blasting the chip with a heat gun did the trick)

[spol]

Thank you both for your suggestions.

First I tried reseating the cables but it did not make any difference.

I had another T520 which someone had spilled something in to at some point, so it smelled bad but still worked.
I swapped the LCD panels on the two laptops, and the problem moved with the panel.
So the conclusion must be that the LCD is damaged.
I was lucky that I had a spare which is now being used for spare parts.