Is my T23 LCD/graphics card toast?

[jk2009]

Is my screen/graphics card beyond repair??

http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/2364/dsc6289.jpg
http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/1254/dsc6288.jpg

The lower half of my monitor started to act up two nights ago. I could still work with it, but the tint getting lighter and lighter. I messed around with the Display Properties|Advanced|troubleshoot settings. When I turned off the hardware acceleration, it helped..for a while. I suspect that it is problem with the graphics card since the problem did go away (for a while) once I changed the settings. After about half-an-hour, the screen had gone completely white.

Also, when I boot up the machine, the bottom half of the screen is blank. The IBM logo in the startup splash screen is also cut off.

Any help would be much appreciated. I would love to get a couple of more years from my laptop.

Admin edit: Two LARGE (>200KB) inline images changed to links. Please post SMALL (~50KB) images AND put a warning (*PIC*) in the subject line. Some people are on dialup or access the forum via cell phones.

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com!

From the images and your description as to the problem getting worse over time, I'd suspect that you have a problem with the video chip that's (more or less) firmly soldered to the motherboard. Other possibility is that the LCD panel is defective. You might want to try an external monitor and see if the problem is duplicated there. If so, then it's definitely the video controller. You can't change it; you can only try a solder re-flow, although I've never seen a T23 have that type of problem. If the external video looks okay, then that doesn't necessarily mean that the video chip is working. There's separate signal paths for the (digital) LCD panel and the (analog) VGA port on the back of the system. Best suggestion to determine where the problem lies would be to swap out the lid assembly with a known good unit and see what happens.

[jk2009]

Thanks for the input Ray. I will test over the weekend.