Streaking lines across laptop display

[rharbin]

Hi. I have an IBM laptop that has developed a horizontal light pink
streaking in the display. The streaks move as I open and close windowns.
They appear as very fine line bar charts. The tops of the bars move up and
down as I move the mouse over them. They seem to be caused by combinations
of certain colors being displayed at the same time. Moving a window up and
down will cause the streaks to follow the various colors in the window such
as the frames. They are most noticible on the grey background found in many
pulldown windowns and dialog boxes. The look is different but I get many of
the same pink colors in the Windows 98 splash screen when I boot up (suggesting
the problem is not with the video card??). Anyone ever experience this and
know of a fix? Thanks in advance. Ron

 

[jaywallen]

Sounds like it's either an imminent video subsystem failure or a driver issue. I've never seen anything quite like what you're describing. You could try giving us more information.

Are the lines / streaks perfectly straight?

Do they run exactly along pixel rows? (They are ALL horizontal, right?)

How many pixels "thick" are the lines? Does that thickness change?

Are the locations of the lines fixed, or do the locations change?

Have you noticed any change in the appearance of the display as you change its angle with respect to the keyboard? (View it dead on for all positions you try to see if there's a change that's not due simply to your perception angle.)

Has the overall brightness of the display changed recently?

Have you recently installed any new devices, updated device drivers for old devices, or software -- as in just before this issue appeared?

Regards,
Jim

 

[rharbin]

Thanks Jim. These are all good questions. This problem has existed for about 6 months. It appears to me as some kind of display failure. I characterized it as a streaking but you could also call it bleeding because the color sort of bleeds from other colors. For example, if I have a 2inch square dialog box on the desktop, there will be a bleeding pink color to the right of the box on top of the desktop. It will extend from the right side of the box to the right side of the screen.

Here are answers to your questions:
The lines are perfectly straight and all perfectly horizontal.
There are about 30 lines in a vertical inch. I?m not sure if that makes them the thickness of a pixel. But horizontally, they vary in length. The length does change as you move the mouse in the vicinity of the lines. Otherwise they maintain their position as long as the objects they are bleeding from stay fixed. Changing the angle of the display has no effect. No change in overall brightness. No software changes that I can remember that might have caused this.

I took a photo of the screen with my digital camera that shows the problem pretty well. If you want to send me your email address, I can send it to you. My email address is harbin2@yahoo.com. Thanks again for your help.

Ron

 

[jaywallen]

Hi, Ron.

Okay, your additional information makes it pretty certain that at least the screen is okay. This sounds more like a video display adaptor or driver issue. It may also have something to do with software which is exceeding the limits of the device driver. For instance, DirectX version changes have done stuff like this to some people's systems.

I am sending you a temporary email address (as soon as the bloomin' Hotmail servers start responding). Sorry I can't use another one right now. I'll be glad to examine the image.

In the meantime I have just a couple of more questions. What is the notebook computer's model number? What does IBM call your LCD screen type? TFT, Dual Scan / DSTN, something else? Have you tried deleting the display adaptor from Device Manager, rebooting and re-installing it? What is the display adaptor manufacturer and model, and what is its device driver version?

Regards,
Jim

 

[rharbin]

Thanks Jim.

These are all good questions. This problem has existed for about 6 months. It appears to me as some kind of display failure. I characterized it as a streaking but you could also call it bleeding because the color sort of bleeds from other colors. For example, if I have a 2inch square dialog box on the desktop, there will be a bleeding pink color to the right of the box on top of the desktop. It will extend from the right side of the box to the right side of the screen.

Here are answers to your questions:
The lines are perfectly straight and all perfectly horizontal.
There are about 30 lines in a vertical inch. I?m not sure if that makes them the thickness of a pixel. But horizontally, they vary in length. The length does change as you move the mouse in the vicinity of the lines. Otherwise they maintain their position as long as the objects they are bleeding from stay fixed. Changing the angle of the display has no effect. No change in overall brightness. No software changes that I can remember that might have caused this.

I took a photo of the screen with my digital camera that shows the problem pretty well. If you want to send me your email address, I can send it to you. My email address is harbin2@yahoo.com. Thanks again for your help.


I have a confession to make. The PC is not mine - it is my brother-in-Laws, who was visiting us from Chicago. He was about ready to get a new one but I talked into trying a couple things (reformatting the HD was next if we got no answer from here and the message I posted on the microsoft.public.win98.display.general newsgroup - still no response there). Yours is good news - thanks. I was pretty certain it was the screen except for the fact that the bleeding moves as windows move around the screen. Having it moves makes me suspect software. But I'm not too familiar with laptop screens. I just took my Sister and Brother IL to the airport so I'll have to work with him to get some answers. He is a little more of a novice than me but he has loaded updated drivers so he isn't completely unfamiliar.

I also suspect a display adapter or driver issue but I believe he downloaded and installed the latest video driver a few months ago with no results. If it is software exceeding the limits of the device driver, it must be a pretty lame driver (assuming it is working properly) because the streaking occurs with nothing but Win98 running. It just is more noticeable when you have dialog boxes open. I don't believe he would have had any reason to load a newer version of DirectX although sometimes a newer version comes with new applications and loading it is just a simple option so that is a possibility. I'm not sure how to tell what version you have on your PC.

The computer is an i1411, Type 2611-411. The display adapter is a Neomagic Magic Graph 128ZV+. I'm not sure what type the display is. It is about a 13" screen. It is a Pentium 300mh PC. Deleting the display adapter is a thought. To be honest, I?m not sure I understand the difference between the display adapter and the video driver. I believe the video driver is what allows the graphics card to communicate with the PC. I?m not sure what the display adapter is. (I have built my own PC, changed out several video cards, and installed/reinstalled video drivers numerous times but I?m still ignorant about some of this). Deleting the display driver is straightforward. But where do you reinstall it from (the Win98 disk)? I?ll have to get you the device driver version.

I have replied to your email and attached a .jpg photo of the screen. One other, probably minor point. The PC is running Win98 ? first edition.

Thanks again for your help and advice. Ron

 

[jaywallen]

I'm sorry about switching back and forth on the jargon there. Display adaptor is what the video drivers drive. In the (somewhat) object oriented parlance of Windows, deleting the device (from Device Manager) removes the drivers. (Unfortunately, it doesn't really remove the files. It just unregisters them and leaves the actual files where they were. This can, and does, often lead to problems.) But that's beside the point for now. I was thinking that attempting to re-install current drivers, or to update them, might improve the video system's performance. But, if your brother-in-law has already updated the drivers with no effect, I'd say that any further fiddling along these lines may be futile.

I'll look for your email -- when I can get into that Hotmail account. Sheesh! The things seems to feel obliged to be unavailable for at least several hours a day. I'll examine the screen image and consider the facts as soon as possible, then I'll get back to you.

Regards,
Jim

Edit: Oops! Meant to add that it is pretty important for us to know the LCD type. Believe it or not, a certain amount of bleeding of this description is quite normal on some types of LCDs. Some color combinations are worse than others. But, if the bleeding is pink regardless of color combination, I'd be inclined to say that this was NOT normal for any LCD. And, since the drivers have been updated and are, apparently, looking okay in Device Manager, it does begin to look a little more like hardware trouble in the display adaptor itself. Can you hook an external monitor to this thing to see if an external monitor shows the same issues? If you can do this, try changing the refresh rates for that external monitor (if possible with your video driver) to see if that has any effect on the bleeding. Also, you might check the video driver advanced settings dialog to see if it includes features like color profiles or color management. If so, check to be sure that the system is using a standard color profile, not a customized one.

 

[erikistired]

the lcd still sounds suspect. i work on alot of thinkpads, and usually any video ghosting turns out being a flakey lcd. here's something you can try tho, hook up a monitor to the external video port, if the video part is going than it should show up on the monitor too (or if the driver is screwy). unfortunately, the video ~card~ is part of the main board, and it's usually as much as the lcd.

anyway, good luck with it.

~erik

 

[erikistired]

actually one other thing, does it do it in DOS or at the bios screen? if it doesn't it might not mean anything (it could be occuring only when you push it to certain resolutions) but if it does then it's more than likely a bad video chip and/or lcd.

~erik

 

[jaywallen]

Okay, I've received the picture of the screen image.

I have never seen ghosting on an LCD that was caused by a fault in the LCD itself -- other than the level of ghosting that's normal in all non-TFT LCD designs. These issues are the fault of the display adaptor or the driver, at least that's always been my experience. However, I have NEVER seen an LCD that looks like the one in the picture you sent me! Never! Not even remotely! I've had my hands on many dozens of notebooks, and I've never seen the like. At this point, I'd entertain anything -- including voodoo.

You absolutely have to hook up an external monitor to this thing to see if the monitor shows the same symptoms. If it does, you can pretty well bet that this is the display adaptor going bad. At least that's my take on it. If the monitor looks perfectly okay, then this has to be an LCD problem.

But, like I said, this one is truly freaky. The scalloped designs of the right borders of the "streaking" phenomena are truly bizarre. This is absoloutely NOT a case of normal behavior of a DSTN, or any other kind of non-TFT LCD.

It's beginning to look moderately grim for your brother-in-law. On the other hand, this may turn out to be an excellent excuse for purchasing a new toy!

Regards,
Jim

 

[erikistired]

can you forward that picture to the email in my sig? i've seen some ghosting on lcds that turned out to be the lcd, not often, but i have seen it happen (one of my many jobs is fixing laptops). maybe i'm lucky (?) or unlucky. anyway, i'd like to see this picture alot. there's also an inverter board in there, but i don't think i've ever come across a problem that replacing the inverter board has fixed. i have one in my shop right now with a red tint to it, the cable that goes from the main board to the inverter board is causing it, fun with laptops.

thanks,

~erik

 

[jaywallen]

Hi, Erik.

I wasn't sure whether you were talking to me or Ron when you asked to have the message / screen shot forwarded, so... I sent you a copy of Ron's email message with the image attached at the email address you specified in your sig.

This is the funniest looking LCD shot I've ever seen. At first glance I thought it was a monitor -- until I realized that the camera was fish-eyeing the view. I hope you can come up with something to help him. I was about to start muttering magical incantations!

Regards,
Jim

 

[erikistired]

hrrrm. i got the pic. looks like your video ~card~ might be the issue after all. i've seen monitors do that before, but never a laptop lcd. anyway, try the monitor thing, and if you have a spare hard drive possibly a fresh load of windows (even though i don't think a corrupt driver could cause that, but it's worth a shot), and good luck with it, i think it's time for some voodoo magic.

~erik

 

[rharbin]

Thanks for the help guys

Hooking up an external monitor is a great idea. My Brother has an external monitor so this should be do-able.

We did try restarting in DOS mode and everything looked fine but there is no color at all on the screen so I looked at that as not real conclusive. However, the color is all screwy (lots of the same color pinks mixed in with the windows clouds etc.) on the Win98 splash screen and I am sure this loads before with just generic video driver (before the one for the "card" loads.

We were going to reformat the HD but I was a little nervous doing it with my Win98SE when all he has is a Win98 CD at home. Reformatting is a pain but it has done wonders for me several times. One quick question related to formatting/partitioning. Any idea why the PC would have come partitioned into two drives when it is only an 8G drive? I thought Win98 had no problems recognizing a drive that size as a single drive.

I'll have my Brother read your comments and try the monitor and one of us will post our findings.

Thanks again greatly for your interest and advice. Ron

 

[jaywallen]

The 8 gigabyte drive in and of itself poses no problem as a single partition for Win98 or Win98SE when formatted FAT32. I don't know why the drive was split into two partitions. There is an Int13 issue with NT 4.0 that prevents boot partitions from extending more than 7.8 gigabytes from the beginning of the drive. That's about the only consideration I can think of here that might be possibly pertinent. Perhaps OEM disk image logistics at the time of manufacture necessitated this arrangement.

I will hope that a reformat and re-install will fix this issue, but, frankly, I doubt that it will. This looks very much like a hardware issue to me. Connecting the external monitor should let you ascertain whether the problem is with the video display adaptor or with the LCD. LCDs (well, the TFT ones anyway) are expensive to replace. Video display adaptors are much less expensive -- on dekstop systems. But notebook computers can be another matter. It depends on whether the video subsystem is integrated into the notebook's motherboard or not. On my Dell I7500, the video subsystem is a replaceable video card, so the motherboard wouldn't have to be replaced in the case of a video display adaptor failure. But in a system where the video subsystem is integrated into the motherboard the cost could be in the range of a full replacement purchase for the PC.

Please do let us know how this turns out. We'll keep our fingers crossed!

Regards,
Jim

 

[erikistired]

open edit or something in dos, that should give you some color.

also, ibm has a fetish for partitioning laptop drives on their thinkpads. i don't even think they put anything on the 2nd partition. anyway, doing one big partition is fine.

~erik

 

[rharbin]

Hi again. Well, my brother-in-law (Len) spent several hours troubleshooting today (retrying to get and install a new video driver) and then hooking the PC up to an external monitor. In the end, the image on the monitor looked just fine pointing the finger at the IBM LCD display. Thanks again for all your advice. Ron

 

[jaywallen]

Hi, Ron.

Thanks for letting us know how it turned out. At least the PC is usable as is, assuning it's not too much of a hassle for Len to use it with an external monitor. This was a very interesting situation. I have never seen an LCD that failed in this manner. It still doesn't really look like something that could be intrinsic to the display panel itself. Perhaps the problem is as simple as a bad connector or wiring harness between the display adaptor and the LCD itself. If so, perhaps the LCD won't have to be replaced.

Good luck!

Regards,
Jim