Talk:Problem with garbled screen

Got an A30 with this problem, don't know what GFX card it has. None of these things seems to help. But a clean reinstall will make it useable during the first boot, during that boot everything runs perfect, after a reboot the screen gets messed up and it can't boot windows in anything but Failsafe mode. Sadly i can't get it fixed under the warrenty as it is 3-4 years old.

Jan 18, 2006 - Me too Just finished a day of working on an A30 with the garbled display problem. Ours boots to the IBM splash screen, but has blue vertical lines running across the screen. When booting to safe mode or to any text mode or utility, the display is responsive (i.e. can navigate using arrow keys, select choices, etc.) but is garbled much like the pictures in the main article of the LILO boot loader screen. The 'garbling' is consistent, and it appears that every other character in the character set gets substituted by the character one value higher than it in the set. For example, capital 'A' displays fine, but capital 'B' get substituted with capital 'C'. 'C' is also fine, but 'D' is substituted with 'E', and so on. The lowercase set corresponds to this pattern exactly as well. As such, the display can be deciphered, but is practically unusable in text mode. When Windows loads, however, everything looks normal. The only Windows-related problem is our inability to load the ATI Radeon driver - the system will not load the GUI with it installed, but will work normally with the generic Windows VGA driver.

Just to be thorough, I did flash the system BIOS and embedded controller software with latest versions, with no change in the display problem.

I attempted to reseat the video connector, but had no luck. Best price I found on a replacement system board was US$279.00, but I haven't decided whether or not to repair it yet.

June 1, 2006 - Here's what happens to me.
Since a few monthes, I also get the blue thick lines running accross the screen, but only if I enter the BIOS setup utility. In my experience there is no relation between the strange "features" shown by my laptop and the PC temperature, but it is much more likely that the screen becomes completely unusable if it is hot.

"Normally" in X I have thin light blue lines that run across the windows and move with it until I resize the window or cover it with a just opened window. In that case the part of the "dirty" window that was covered by the "clean" window becomes "clean"...at least until you move it again. If I move the window very fast it becomes completely light blue. It's like if the driver (or the hardware) could not refresh properly the windows. Take a look at this screenshot.

Are we all sure that we are facing an actual hardware problem? Has anybody ever tried to run X by just using the generic VGA driver? I gather from the previous post that MS-Windows does not show problems in that case. I would try myself, but I do not know how to change the driver for X!