my dads got an old (4 years) dell laptop and recently its been having problems.. when he is using it the screen goes all funny and after a while will crash the laptop.. when it happens if the laptop is moved it becomes worse.. sorry for the blad description but its hard to describe.. am i guessing it could be down to the graphics card??
Why you say funny, do you mean colors going 'off' (i.e. too much red, gree or blue), shaking, stripes appearing, atrifacting, tearing, blacking out or something else? Id the crash just a black screen, BSoD, locking up? I had a friend who's laptop had its heatsinks full of dust/general other crap which caused the CPU and GPU to overheat. Open it up (may be harder than it sounds ), clean the heatsinks and test.
yer the screen just shows scattered colors (red,green,blue) sort of what your saying... i might have a look underneath.. my dad has had the keyboard off before but i dont think he has had the whole thing apart..
If it's a vertical banding of colors (like | red | green | blue |) it could be a loose connector for the LCD's ribbon cable (thin yellow kind). But I'd be more inclined to suggest overheating if switching it off and not moving it fixes the problem (connector would need to be knocked back into place). You could boot to a Live CD/USB Pen distro of Linux and leaving it for a few hours to rule out a software/driver issue.
