Earlier today, I opened my Dell Inspirion 8500 laptop as I normally do and clicked on my name to log in. I left for about 40 minutes, then returned to do some work. Upon sitting down and moving the mouse to see what the latest Windows Update was for, the screen got green dot packets all over it and froze. I turned the laptop off, then restarted it. The screen got a green/white tint, but nothing else happened. The HDD didn't seem to be spinning, nothing. I shut it down and left it. I came back later and it booted up. Got to the Bios screen, the Windows XP splash screen, then I logged in. From there, the green dots happened again.
I tried several things, but the computer would either freeze with the green (or other color dots/lines/freeze, then die to a black screen) or stop doing anything before even reaching the Dell Bios Screen, showing me a color, usually purple or green. I connected the laptop to an external monitor, which worked...whenever the laptop screen did.
I eventually tried using a bootdisk, hoping that I had a virus. When I used the bootdisk, it worked, but I later discovered that it was a coincidence. First I booted to DOS. Lines of color appeared on the screen. Pushing on the keyboard/screen makes the colors change/go away, which led me to believe it was a hardware connection. After getting it running, I ran some virus scans and etc. It sat there for three hours, running the scans. Whenever I came back, seeing it had finished, I brought up FireFox and changed the page. It froze with the green and died to a black screen. Tried using the bootdisk, but nothing happened.
I'm racking my brain trying to figure anything out. I've never had this problem before and it showed no signs of a problem whenever I was using it last night. Any help is appreciated.
I tried several things, but the computer would either freeze with the green (or other color dots/lines/freeze, then die to a black screen) or stop doing anything before even reaching the Dell Bios Screen, showing me a color, usually purple or green. I connected the laptop to an external monitor, which worked...whenever the laptop screen did.
I eventually tried using a bootdisk, hoping that I had a virus. When I used the bootdisk, it worked, but I later discovered that it was a coincidence. First I booted to DOS. Lines of color appeared on the screen. Pushing on the keyboard/screen makes the colors change/go away, which led me to believe it was a hardware connection. After getting it running, I ran some virus scans and etc. It sat there for three hours, running the scans. Whenever I came back, seeing it had finished, I brought up FireFox and changed the page. It froze with the green and died to a black screen. Tried using the bootdisk, but nothing happened.
I'm racking my brain trying to figure anything out. I've never had this problem before and it showed no signs of a problem whenever I was using it last night. Any help is appreciated.
