t41p display issue

[manamana]

Pretty sure this is a hardware issue, I'm hoping someone with some knowledge of the interior could tell me where to start looking (might just be a loose cable or something) or if this is going to be an expensive repair.

the details:

t41p, 1.7, 512, extended battery.

everything works fine from a cold start. at some point, after maybe 5 minutes in windows, the screen flickers and either comes back messed up (shifted pixels/ general cruddieness), or simply goes out, it usually eventually winds up totally out after more time (but the backlight is still on).

I tried using the restore disks, and it did it as well when loading the second disk, so it's not a windows thing. Things I've noticed:

it does it quicker if the computer is warm (fresh restart or off/on)

no difference between battery or a/c

slightly flexing the body of the computer will usually change the distortion and/or bring it back, and additionally pressing th Fn-f3 (display on/off) will sometimes bring it back as well.

Thanks in advance for any help,
~chris

[Flightvector]

Since the display is fine on a cold startup everytime and the backlight is always working, I doubt it is a faulty connection between the LCD and graphics card. You need to isolate the issue to one of the two major components that might be causing the issue.

You say it happens after warming up, so the first thing I'd isolate is the GPU. I would do this by plugging the laptop into an external display and running some graphics intensive app and see if anything fishy is going on with the external display. If any issues occur, it is most likely the GPU and possibly a larger issue.

If the external display is fine, then I would target the LCD panel itself or its inverter as the issue. I would go for warranty fixes in both cases. The connector is really not likely to be an issue if it works on cold startups, but you might want to check just in case.