Screen flicker problem on bottom third of screen

[Quimbly]

Hi all,
I'm experiencing intermittent screen flicker on the bottom third of the screen on my T400 (6475CTO).

I'm quite sure the problem is hardware related. Here's some tidbits:
- The flicker is sometimes mild: brief flashes and/or horizontal lines making the content on the bottom third of the screen somewhat illegible. Sometimes the flicker is not flickering, but a complete wash-out of the bottom third of the screen -- mostly white with some random colors.
- If I tilt the lid, the screen often starts to flicker. If I fidget with the lid, pushing it back or forth, I can get the flickering the stop -- usually. - After the screen power-saving feature turns it off and I turn it back on, the bottom third of the screen is usually all black, where it usually flickers. Similarly, if I fidget with the lid again, it comes back.

Occasionally my method of pushing and pulling (tilting) the lid doesn't stop the flicker, I occasionally try something else: If I press hard on the plastic bezel section between the blue ThinkVantage button and the power button, and then tilt the lid, the flicker usually seems to stop for a while. Problems arise when I tilt the lid again, close and then re-open the lid, or if I bump my desk.

If I had to guess, I would say there's a problem with the monitor cable which (coincidentally) runs underneath the section of the bezel I mentioned above. I took the keyboard and palm rest off and poked around a bit, but I didn't see any problems.


If you have experience with this sort of thing, can you recommend what I do? My laptop is out of warranty. Any suggestions on how to fix this myself?

Thank you.

[Colonel O'Neill]

The cable should be fine. I'd think it's the panel itself that's damaged somehow. Usually, this means squeezing the edge of the lid temporarily fixes it. Cable damage is usually more consistent. Try reseating the cable under the keyboard anyway.

[comps]

There's an occasional screen flicker in the lower 1/3 of the screen on Linux with the i915 driver loaded using powersave=1 (which is also the default, one needs to manually specify powersave=0 to fix it). Nothing like complete wash-out, though.