About a week ago, I was online and suddenly a few of the pixels were discolored. It went away pretty quickly but it keeps coming back and is worse than before. For example, as I am typing this, there are all these random blue and red dots on the screen. They appear and disappear at random. Anyone have any ideas? My laptop is on its last legs and I am fully expecting someone to tell me that this problem is something that isn’t worth fixing but you never know, there might be an easy solution.
See if it’s just stuck pixels.
You can run the video you can download here in QuickTime. Or you can download Undead Pixel, which sometimes can free up a stuck pixel, too (here’s one site, feel free to search your own favorite freeware source).
It might be something as simple as a loose connection internally, your video driver might be corrupt, or it could be something as bad as the video circuitry or the LCD panel failing.
Do the spots change in any way when you move the laptop or the screen? If so, it’s probably a loose cable. The hard part would be in disassembling the laptop to reach the thing, but if you’re mechanically handy and can find disassembly/reassembly instructions for the laptop (or are brave enough to “wing it”) the repair is free.
Replacing the video driver software is free and non-invasive. Try boting into Safe Mode as that’s a nearly driver-free mode at 640x480. If the problem’s gone, then it’s almost certainly a driver problem.
No, the spots seem to be static. For instance, if there were some on the SDMB banner, then I can scroll down and the spots will stay on the same place on the banner. I suspect that it’s something to do with the video card since I’ve had other problems with that. I tried updating the drivers once but I couldn’t find a match on the ATI website. I haven’t tried safemode so thanks for the tip, gotpasswords!
Also, thanks for the link, KneadtoKnow. I’ll try that first when they come back.
If the spots stay then it’s most likely the screen. Try massaging the spot a bit with your finger.
You say that if the spots are on a banner and you scroll down they are still on the banner. That sounds like the spots are not static, that is, they don’t remain on the same spot on the screen but move along with the graphics (the banner) of the website. I can’t solve your issue but it would help someone else do so if the problem were explained more clearly I think.
One possibility (of many): What Internet service provider do you use? Some of them will apply their own image compression on top of the JPEG or GIF compression that’s already there, and since this compression is necessarily lossy, it sometimes leaves visible artifacts. Does this ever happen with things not from the Internet? Also, does it ever happen with things that aren’t images (the middle of a block of text, say)?
They move along with what they first appeared on, whether it’s graphic or text. Sorry if I was unclear.
Chronos, they can appear anywhere on screen regardless of what program is running, so I don’t think it’s that.
I tried this with no change but thanks for the suggestion.