R60 exterior display problem

[gimmeagig]

Hi,
I use my R60 pretty much like a desktop. I have an external mouse/keyboard and I also use an external monitor.In the past few months I have had it happen that the colors on the external monitor were missing the reds.But when i look at the screen of the laptop itself, everything looked like it should.I changed the cable to the external monitor, no difference. I used electronics cleaner on the monitor input and that fixed it. I got it back to normal about 10 times over the past few months.Today it did not work anymore so I bought a new monitor. I plugged it in, that same thing, no reds.How strange is that? I have a backup R60 and I plugged the original monitor into that and it looks fine. So it's something related to the laptop.I'm wondering why I was able to get it going 10 times with the electronics cleaner into the monitor when that wasn't the problem.. And of course I'd like to know what I could do to fix my laptop.
Is there a graphics card inside that I could change out? Any suggestions? Please help,I'm not an expert at this and my display looks really ugly.

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the forum.
Those R60s come with either ATI or Intel graphics.
In either case, you'll need to replace the motherboard, as the graphics chip is soldered/integrated and cannot be replaced on its own.
If you remove palmrest and memory, you'll find a label with the motherboard's P/N or FRU.

On the bottom of your laptop is a sticker with TYPE xxxx-yyy followed by S/N zzzzzzzz
We would like to know just your TYPE to help further.

[gimmeagig]

Thanks for offering to help.
On the bottom of the laptop is a sticker that says
Type 9457-8Ju S/N LV-DC246 07/04
So I tried another thing. The R60 has a S Video out and I plugged that into a TV,all the colors show as they should. So I'm thinking it cannot be the video chip.It has to be the connection from the board to the VGA output. I'm not an expert so I don't know if there is a cable going to that output or if the output is mounted to a circuit board. I cleaned it with contact cleaner and that did not help.
So I just found out that there is a USB to VGA converter video card. Best Buy has them for 49.-, E Bay sells them for 10.-. I don't know if there are differences in picture quality. I do want the best possible image quality from my laptop. Do you guys think that this is a good way for me to go?
As another possibility, I do have a spare R60 but it has only a 60 gig drive and my current one as a 500 gig.
Is it difficult to swap drives? I could also buy a 500 gig drive for the spare and use my Acronis backup software to install my latest full backup image on the new drive. I have never tried that but that is supposed to work without having to reinstall the operating system and all the programs.