Video Display Fault: Laptop LCD Screen Video Display Is Distorted

Laptop LCD screen display is distorted, switching on your laptop, it boots normally, looking at the screen you can clearly see that the backlight is on but the picture or video displayed on the Laptop LCD screen is highly distorted. You try rebooting the laptop again to see if you will get a better result this time around but things are still the same, nothing much has changed, you try to figure out what could be the problem, could it be the VGA card, because definitely it can’t be the backlight tube since the lighting of the laptop is OK.

Also it can not be the video cable since the Laptop is actually displaying some picture or video but the only problem is that, the picture or video is distorted. If the problem is from the video cable, video signal to the laptop LCD screen would be cut off completely, so that one is more or less ruled out of the equation, so our options for troubleshooting is narrowed to the VGA card and the laptop LCD screen.

Possible Faults

·       Faulty or damaged VGA card

·       Bad laptop LCD screen

Solutions

• The first step is to check the laptop with an external monitor, to do this connect the laptop to an external monitor, press the Fn key on the laptop keyboard together with any of the F1 – F12 keys (the F key has the image or picture of a screen on it) combination depending on the configuration of your laptop to switch the laptop video output display to external mode, in some situation you need to reboot the laptop to switch it to external mode.

• After you have succeeded in switching the display to external mode, if you get a clear picture displayed on the external monitor, that means the VGA card is OK, but if you get a distorted picture or video display similar to the one on the laptop on the external monitor, then it means that the VGA card is bad and needs to be replaced and in most cases the VGA card is permanently attached to the motherboard, and that means the entire motherboard has to be replaced.

• If you have followed the procedure above and came to a conclusion that the VGA card is OK, then the cause of the problem is the Laptop LCD screen, it is possibly faulty and needs to be replaces, replacing a laptop screen is a bit delicate but that doesn’t mean it is a task that you can not perform, all it requires from you is a bit more care when fixing the new screen and also ensure that you buy exactly the same type as the old screen.