I got this laptop back in December 2007. It has never had a problem up until about 6 months ago when lightning hit it and the Ethernet port and the 2 USB ports on the right side of the computer stopped working, but everything else seemed fine.
I have since built a new desktop (thanks to this site) and I gave my old laptop to my girlfriend. She uses it mainly to download flash-type games, Lord Of The Rings Online MMORPG.
A month ago we were gaming in LOTRO and all of a sudden her screen went black and shut down. She was able to reboot and start back playing with no issues... this has happened 3 or 4 more times over the last month.
As of a few days ago, the screen did the same thing and black out, but when it started rebooting, the screen looked really bad with white pixaly lines going across it and instead of having one screen, it was 4 views of the screen stacked on top of eachother... so if you take your screen, squish it down to make it long and thin, then copy and paste it on top of eachother 3 more times, thats what it looks like...
I have since run a Microsoft Security Essentials scan and that didn't seem to help. I am able to log on and go to the internet and program and stuff, but everything is really hard to read because it is soo small...
Anyone have any suggestions on how to trouble shoot this? On a scale of 1-10 on computer knowledge im about a 4-5 (built my own AMD computer about a few months ago and swapped out some RAM here and there, and thats the extent). Should I take it to a computer shop for diagnostics? or is this computer pretty much shot? (which I hope is NOT the case, of course)
Thanks in advance for any help.
Oh and by the way, I tried to take a screen shot of what was going on, but it only took a SS of that 1/4 of the screen so it looks like everything is completely normal...
I have since built a new desktop (thanks to this site) and I gave my old laptop to my girlfriend. She uses it mainly to download flash-type games, Lord Of The Rings Online MMORPG.
A month ago we were gaming in LOTRO and all of a sudden her screen went black and shut down. She was able to reboot and start back playing with no issues... this has happened 3 or 4 more times over the last month.
As of a few days ago, the screen did the same thing and black out, but when it started rebooting, the screen looked really bad with white pixaly lines going across it and instead of having one screen, it was 4 views of the screen stacked on top of eachother... so if you take your screen, squish it down to make it long and thin, then copy and paste it on top of eachother 3 more times, thats what it looks like...
I have since run a Microsoft Security Essentials scan and that didn't seem to help. I am able to log on and go to the internet and program and stuff, but everything is really hard to read because it is soo small...
Anyone have any suggestions on how to trouble shoot this? On a scale of 1-10 on computer knowledge im about a 4-5 (built my own AMD computer about a few months ago and swapped out some RAM here and there, and thats the extent). Should I take it to a computer shop for diagnostics? or is this computer pretty much shot? (which I hope is NOT the case, of course)
Thanks in advance for any help.
Oh and by the way, I tried to take a screen shot of what was going on, but it only took a SS of that 1/4 of the screen so it looks like everything is completely normal...
