Weird computer glitch

[Chris]

I woke up this morning and there was a line across my LCD. It is always on top, goes over any program that I open. A thin 1 pixel black line just north of center.

Anyone see that before?

[krohnathlonman]

sounds alot like dead pixels.

I had a diagonal line on my old laptop.... they wanted $700 for a replacement screen so I bought a brand new laptop for $1200 and I'm going to just part out some of the stuff and put what I can into the new laptop

I know... but the new one has the core DUO CPU, Media Center, remote and tons of other goodies the old one didn't have....

[Mike]

Dead pixels... what is that? I had something similar on my old laptop. It didn't effect me much so I never got anything done...

[chromate]

Nah, I doubt it's dead pixels. I think you're unlikely to get a complete line of them right across the screen.

Sounds like a graphics card / cable problem. Make sure the card and cables are secure and pressed home properly.

[Chris]

connections are secure... earlier this morning though it changed to a white line from a black line... now its a black line again.

[KLB]

Sounds like a bad connection inside the monitor like a ribbon contact is loose.

[Dan Grossman]

I've seen a lot of laptop screens do this and with all of them it was permanent as far as I know (opening 'em up and reconnecting the cable didn't help).

[krohnathlonman]

KLB, do you work on computers?

Ribbon cables belong to your hard drives ;)

"dead pixels" is a generalized term. MOST of the time an LCD will come with a few dead pixels in random spots. Most of the time you'll never notice them.

Sometimes after extensive use pixels and sometimes entire rows of pixels will just die or fade or malfunction in some way. If you're like me you use your screen 12+ hrs/day and well... LCD's are proving to me to just not hold up like I'd like so I've given up on buying really expensive LCDs.

[KLB]

Your thinking of a different type of ribbon cable. There are all kinds of ribbon cables including ones in laptops that go from the motherboard up into the lid for the display pannel. They are connected very differently from the way the ribbon cable you are thinking of. Hard drive ribbon cables are designed to be plugged in and unplugged easily. The ribbon cable I'm talking about is not really designed for this purpose. My thought was to look at the cable and see if maybe one of the leads wasn't making proper contact. This would be easy to fix. If the problem is in the LCD it isn't easy to fix and the LCD would have to be replaced.

[chromate]

Chris, can you test the LCD on another computer? Isolate the problem.

[Chris]

thats a good idea chromate. bit of a pain in the *** though because I'd have to unplug everything... but I suppose it is worth a shot.

[BGray]

I had this with my old monitor and did exactly what Chromate suggested.

It's probably going to be a monitor going bad or a graphics card. Mine was my graphics card. Replaced it and was back to normal.

[chromate]

Actually, I've suddenly remembered, this exact same thing happened where I used to work. It was the graphics card.