I have a dell inspiron 1545 running windows 7 64-bit that I fear may be dying. It was running sweet as a peach tonight when suddenly the screen starting flickering red horizontal lines, with no other display on show. I rebooted and it started loading windows, with the animated windows logo, then I hear the sound for that it plays for the login screen, but all I get is the red lines flickering at me again. Booted into safe mode, checked devices, everything seemed fine, so I did a system restore. Same problem again. I then resorted to plugging it into my dell monitor in the vain hope of maybe using that as a screen. Booted up again, I suddenly get the windows login screen, but on the laptop. I promptly unplug the vga cable only for the screen to go off and start flickering at me again. Plugged the vga back in, laptop display comes on but I get nothing on my external monitor, it just seems to be going from powered on, to sleep mode, to powered on again. Weird, huh? At the moment it's running on clone display mode, with the monitor as the main, and the laptop screen as the secondary, but i'm too scared to touch these settings incase it doesn't work and i can't get it back again. It's running on the Intel chipset and I've tried reinstalled the drivers, but to no avail. Just to throw something else in the mix, the computer seems to be responding quite slowly. As I type it takes about a half second to actually appear on screen. Hope that's enough information for a diagnosis, if not I can add more as and when it's needed. Thanks in advance!

Paul, February 2010

Hi. Thats an in-depth post but its still difficult to tell you whether it is the motherboard or the screen. If there are only a few lines and goes away when the screen is bent a bit, then its the screen. Otherwise it could be the graphics chip, or it could be the LCD harness. Is there anything that you can do like put it in certain angles that the display goes ok? Dont worry about the external VGA. Some laptops just need to be configured to output to VGA port. If it is ok in safe mode, it means that the chipset video is ok. When you go into normal windows, if screen corrupts as it is about the load the login screen but is fine all the way up until this point everytime, it will definitely be the motherboard. This is because your graphics chip (not the standard chipset one) kicks in to give you a higher resolution and better display. This would therefore mean either reflowing the graphics chipset, or just replacing the motherboard, If you have warranty, then use it. Otherwise, cheaper option is a repair. Hope the information is of an use to you

Kash, February 2010