I have an issue with my laptop display. I have 2 other friends with the EXACT same laptop who suffer from the SAME display problem.
I have an issue with my laptop’s display. I have an ibuypower.com Battalion laptop with a Centrino processor and ATI Radeon 9700 mobility card running XP. I have 2 other friends with the EXACT same laptop who suffer from the SAME display problem. We all got ours around the same time. (It’s been 2 years)
When I have been playing a 3d game for about 30 mins+ my display will go to black (still on, but no picture). The computer is still running and I still have sound. After about 3 mins, the display will come back (after being on pause, no rendering taking place). Also, I noticed if I lift the laptop from the table when the display goes black, it will come back on!
I have tried installing different drivers from different sources for the 3d card and all share the problem.
I think this could either be a heat issue or a connection issue. Is there some sort of thermal grease that goes on 3d cards that could have just worn out? What might be loose?
If all three similar laptops have the same issue then I wouldn’t think that a loose connection would be a problem. I think it could be a heat related problem but it’s hard to say witch part is causing it. What if you connect an external monitor and make your laptop to output the video just on the external monitor. If your laptop screen goes black because of the video card heat issue, then the external monitor should go black too. If the external monitor works fine, then it might be a display assembly or screen related issue. I would also try to call to the manufacturer and ask them if there are any firmware updates for your model. Ask them if there is a BIOS update for your laptop.
I’m not sure if the video card has a dedicated fan in this model. Can you check if the fan spins at all when you start the laptop? Usually a video chip should have some thermal grease applied between the chip surface and the heatsink (cooling fan). If you can easily access the video chip, I would definitely try to replace the old thermal grease.
December 21st, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Hi , firts of my my notebook specs : Toshiba a75-209 p4 3.06 756 mb ram radeon 9000 igp ( 512mb onboard pc2700 and a 256mb pc2700 ofboard)- cooling fans clean (no overheating problems) .
So now my problem , when playing bf1942 or others 3d games ( even the ones with low requirements) my fps in bf1942 is about 30fps with catalyst drivers and almost 70 with dna drivers , but the problem is no matter what drive i use every 30seconds or more the game slows way down 10 to 15fps or and them go back to normal , the fan is normal no changes , no excessive heat , i read or another forum a guy with the same issue and he had 1gb of ram . any ideas on how to same my problem ?
Thanks for any help guys – Happy xmas
January 6th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
I have an Acer Aspire 3500, it does not have a video card and this is a problem as it is needed to run many games and animations on the Internet.
Is is possible to add a video card to an already established machine…obviously I couldn’t do it myself, but approximately how much would it cost?
Thanks
Brooke
January 8th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Hello Specialist!! (Regarding Dell Latitude D600)
My(and my laptops) problem is that it is only possible to watch DVD´s when an external monitor is attacted. With no external monitor connected, all is black. I have tried to switch main displays and other display settings with no results. It does not matter wich DVD-player is in use (WinDVD, WMP11, etc..)Do you have any ideas what it can be? Regards and Thanks, Jonas
January 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
question:
im fixing a Bell easynote laptop for my daughters friend and it did have XP loaded, but i had to remove this as i only have win2000 cd, so i re-built the laptop with w2k and all worked fine, but i have do not have any display drivers etc, so the screen is large, i can’t seem to find a site where i can download the drivers for this laptop, now i don’t know the model, as there is nothing on the laptop apart from “easynote”, any help for drivers for this device would be great, thanks in advance.
gary
January 8th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Gary,
Have you tried here? You can search by the part number or serial number.
January 8th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Brooke,
You mean the video card is integrated into the motherboard and you would like to install a dedicated video card? In most cases (99%) it’s not possible.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Hi laptop freak, i have no idea if there is one in there already….i cant play any games that need a video card…i really just want to play the sims!
I have an acer aspire 3500.
Thanks your help is much appreciated.
January 9th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Jonas,
The laptop LCD is always black or only when you play a DVD movie? How black it is, totally black (no data, no backlight) or there is a backlight but no data? More details please.
January 9th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Brooke,
Any laptop must have a video card in order to display an image on the screen. Most likely the video games you are trying to play require a better video card. There is nothing you can do.
January 9th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Laptop Freak,
When I insert a DVD, the player (InterVideo WinDVD or WMP) starts and then following happends:
1. With no external monitor connected, the PLAYER WINDOW is black. Rest of the LCD is normal.
When starting the DVD with WinDVD, I get an error message in the WinDVD window saying: “Create Overlay failed. Please lower your screen resolution or color depth and try again”. Have tried this, but does not help. Gets the same error message with RealPlayer.
2. With an external monitor connected, then I can select on which monitor to wiew the DVD and all looks fine. (laptop-LCD or external monitor).
According to Microsoft, there could be a problem if more than one DVD decoder is installed but that is not the case. In use is InterWinDVD decoder.
OP-systems: XP Professional
Display adapter: Mobility Radeon 9000
Any clue?
Thanks Jonas
January 9th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Hey Jonas,
That’s a really weird problem. Right now I cannot even guess if the problem is software or hardware related. I would try reinstalling the operating system. I understand that’s the last thing you want to do, but I think that’s the only way to isolate potential software related issues.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:16 am
Hello Laptop Freak!
Yes, it is a weird problem. Thanks anyway!
Regards Jonas
January 11th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
I have a Gateway YG2 on xpsp2 with Radeon 9000. After running for 10-15 minutes, video display tends to go snowy, jittery. Problem somewhat alleviated with motion video. Display on external monitor is fine. Can’t seem to find any similar postings or answers other than my suspicions of inverter/cable problems. Cable has been reseated. Could this be some wierd ground issue as pressure applied to case adjacent to cable channel briefly corrects the problem? I will try rolling video back to vga generic. In the meantime, any ideas.
Thanks,
Chris
January 13th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Chris Meymandi,
I think it’s possible that you have some kind of grounding issue. Unfortunately for the further investigation it would be necessary to remove the top cover from the laptop and find out where exactly you have to apply pressure to correct the problem: motherboard, video cable connector on the motherboard, video harness itself, etc… There is no simple answer to this question.
January 13th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
In addition to my previous posting about laptop display problem, I have found that streaming video constantly running, which forces the main fan to run in the cooling process, clears the display problem. This is under lengthy duration usage. Any further ideas? I am going to let the Gateway 600YG2 run constantly and let go into standby rather than power-off and observe the results. Appreciate any further feedback.
Thanks,
Chris
January 18th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Hi All, i been reading a lot of posting regarding video problem on laptops. i have a sony laptop that has the same problem. the battery hold no charge so i use the ac adapter. when i turn it on, the power led turns on green but i cannot hear any activities inside the laptop. there is no video. the power led stay green. so i decided to open it and found out that when i turn it on, one of the fans turn on and after 3-4 seconds it turns off. there is no video in the screen. i haven’t try to play around with the memory yet but if that doesn’t work do you think it is a dead motherboard or cpu. there is no beeps at all. it looks like when you turn it on there is a little bit of power and all of a sudden power goes away because the fan turns on and immediately turns off. any ideas?
January 19th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Hi, I have a Toshiba Satellite P15-S420 and my problem is that I cannot play clips of videos online, mostly little music clips. They buffer (don’t know what that means), start to play, stop after five seconds, and start buffering all over again. Stop after five seconds, rebuffer, and on and on. I checked my Direct X tab but it said that it was fine. I don’t know where else to look. I would appreciate any help on this. My regular DVD player works fine and I have no problem with that. It just seems as though the feed (?) is constantly interrupted. Thanks again.
January 20th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Ervin,
First, test the laptop with a known good memory module, it might help. Also test the AC adapter, make sure it puts out correct voltage. If it doesn’t help, then most likely you have a problem with the motherboard. From my experience, CPU failures are not very common.
January 21st, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Bill,
Probably there is nothing wrong with your laptop, you just need a faster Internet connection.
January 21st, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Hi, thanks for the answer. Is there a way to increase the connection speed? Is that what a video card does? This system has Nvideia gaming stuff, which I don’t use, but wouldn’t that cover it? I have dial up, could that be the problem? Thanks so much.
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Bill,
That’s your problem. If you have a good internet connection, you can watch streaming video even with a very cheap video card. But if you have dial up connection even a super-duper gaming video card will not help.
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Hi, all.
I have an HP Pavilion laptop and started having this problem only recently. When I try to change my desktop background in the Desktop Properties, the “Background” selection box locks me out and I’m not able to pick any of the options. Additionally, “Browse” box and “Position” box are locked as well. The only thing I can change is the color of the background. I’ve tried right clicking on a picture and forcing it as a background, but nothing changes, so I’m stuck with the same old background. Has anyone had a similar problem?
Thanks!
February 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am
Hi. I have a Toshiba Satellite A105 that has begun to have small display errors, individual pixels changing color rapidly to look slightly like snow, or a bad tv reception. It’s fairly minimal, but it’s annoying and not ordinary. I notice that it does not happen all the time, comes and goes but happens especially on graphics intensive things like 3d games. It happens most of the time in normal windows operation as well, unless I turn my wireless card off and presto, they go away instantly. The opposite is true when I turn it on again. I can also make them go away by pressing on the bottom of the laptop under the slots on the lower left side. Thank you for your help!
December 3rd, 2007 at 7:53 am
I have recently purchased an HDTV with a PC input and I wanted to try connecting up my laptop to it. I purchased the higher quality monitor cable and all displayed as you would expect on it. The problem is when the cooling fan cycles on and off in the laptop. When the fan comes on, the TV goes black and says that it has lost the monitor signal. When the laptop’s fan cuts off, the TV pops back up the computer’s desktop image. Any suggestions to about why the fan is interferring with or killing my external monitor signal?
Thanks
Chris
March 22nd, 2008 at 3:47 am
Hi laptop freak,
I have a strange problem with my Toshiba M100 Satellite laptop. (Win XP, 1.6 Centrino Duo, 2GB RAM).
My screen has random blue pixels, usually within the grey areas of windows that are open (top of Firefox, taskbar etc) This can occasionally be fixed by tapping the side of the screen on both sides, but this does not appear to be fixing it now! I have the latest video drivers etc, which have not made any difference.
If you move the window around the screen the blue pixels will move with it, however if the screen is all white you will not see any blue pixels. Yellow images appear to make the blue pixels the worst. Would this be damage to the LCD or something else? Would changing the screen be a major job? I am quite handy with a screwdriver! Any help would be appreciated, Thanks!
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:49 am
Careron Kennedy,
You’ll find some suggestions in the following post:
My screen has random blue pixels
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Hi there,
I have a Toshiba laptop TE2100 with XP Home edition, and I recently formatted the harddrive and reinstalled XP and all was good. But then I downloaded and installed service pack 2 and the computer restarted once the install was complete. But after it restarted the display was no longer filling up the whole LCD screen, while starting up windows the display looks fine but once it gets to the login and desktop display it doesn’t cover the entire width of the screen (about half an inch on the right hand side remains black, but the time and toolbar is shifted with it. What do I need to do to fix the display so that it covers the whole screen??
THanks heaps,
Dan
April 8th, 2008 at 1:15 am
Hi Laptop Freak,
My toshiba laptop satellite M100, it suddenly power off itself, when I watch video in internet, or playing games, and the bottom of the laptop get so hot. Please tell me the solution.
thank you very much.
August 20th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
For the TE2100 you need to install the Intel chipset first. Then the display driver. (nvidia). Otherwise the display won’t stretch on the screen.