In Search Of your expertise...

[applesseed]

My Aunt asked me to take a look at her EliteGroup notebook as when she turns on, nothing comes up. Either I"m blind or just can't find the model number of the notebook so anyway...

Turned on the notebook, and we see all these vertical colored lines ranging from red to green, some blue streaks and white streaks all vertical line. My initial thought could be the graphic card but not too sure yet.

To test if it's a HDD issue, I swapped out one of my working notebook's HDD into the EliteGroup and the same thing happens - you see all these streaks. Yeah, my notebook was running fine before she came over.

So would you say this could be an issue with the video card and not a hard disk issue? I don't want to open up the notebook - certainly don't know where to start - I guess there are screws at the bottom but don't want to mess it up. Notebook was purchased 2005 - I guess warranty doesn't cover that long. Any options here? What would you do in this situation? Get a new notebook, get a new motherboard if I guess it's a built-in graphic card. Is there some sort of hardware to bypass using the notebook's graphic card and use an external one?

Your advice? Thanks in advance!

 

[IlllI]

no bypass. will probably have to get a new mobo since many gpus are soldered onto the mobo. check ebay but w/o a p/n or s/n good luck trying to find the right one

 

[DaveSimmons]

Since she probably never backed anything up, remember that you can put her laptop HD into an external enclosure or use one of those all-in-one IDE/SATA to USB adapters that connects to a bare drive.

 

[TC91]

Probably the video chipset but I wouldn't rule out bad ram.

 

[hans030390]

Why not test her HDD in another working laptop? Same for RAM.

Sounds like a GPU issue, though.