R51 Screen develops several small horizontal lines

[sonnyz]

After being on for about 5 minutes a few small horizontal lines begin to flicker around border windows, text and images. After a few more minutes the horizontal lines are everywhere making it impossible to read any text.

Sometimes (seemingly randomly) the screen clears up completely for a few seconds, only to get worse afterwords.

After shutting down the machine for a few minutes the problem goes away.

When I extend my desktop to a 2nd monitor the problem is only on the laptop screen.

Below is a link to a video of the screen when the lines appear.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=rSgP46oL6HQ

Has anyone experienced this or does anyone have any guesses as to what needs to be replaced?

Any help is appreciated.

thanks,
SonnyZ

[Harryc]

If you boot into safe mode does the problem reoccur?

[sonnyz]

Yes, if I reboot once the lines show up the ThinkPad startup screen is just as messed up.

[ajkula66]

Try testing it on external monitor. If the picture is clean, it's probably an inverter issue. If it's not, the video card is bad...motherboard replacement likely needed.

[sonnyz]

Thanks for the reply, as I stated above, the picture is clean on external monitors. I have an R50 that works great, could I swap inverters to see if that is the problem?

[ajkula66]

First you'd have to make sure the inverters are the same...I'm not an expert on the issue...but that sounds about right.

[sonnyz]

The inverters look the same but the FRU is different. For the R51 it is 27K9952 but the R50 is 91P7335. Maybe its because the screen sizes are different.

[ajkula66]

I wouldn't play with it then. Wait for a couple of more responses, hopefully from people who know this stuff better than I do...

Sorry I can't be more helpful...