Laptop screen and heat issues

[Raknor]

I have a sony vaio fz180e. Recently i noticed that after 5 or so mins of use, small grey diagonal lines appear across the screen. they are very light and were at first hard to see but have become more prominent over time. Another thing i have noticed is that there is a color difference between my laptop and desktop screens. when looking at a white page the laptop screen seems almost to be yellowish in color, and not a true white. I googled this a bit and found that sometimes this can be caused by the laptop overheating....not sure about this. got coretemp and recorded temps around 56c while idling! this shocked me because my desktop idles at 27c and rarely goes above 56 on load. is this normal for laptops and what do you think could be causing my screen problems? Any thoughts would be appreciated!


thanks,
David

[jorsoft03]

Laptops do tend to run warmer but that definitely does seem too high. Graphics can be particularly susceptible to heat in some models and the symptoms you're describing sound like artifacting to me, so yeah I think this is all heat related. Check out your fan vents first of all and remove any dust, compressed air works well for this. If it's still running hot it's possible that a fan has died or a the heat sink for your cpu may need some new thermal paste (or possibly even replacement but that pretty unlikely). I don't have time to dig for a service manual right now but if you use Google you can probably find one easily enough, or some ad hoc instructions for getting at the cpu. Usually it's just a few screws on the bottom and then you just lift up the keyboard and disconnect it.

[CalcProgrammer1]

56 doesn't seem high for a laptop...mine idles between 45 and 55 and under load approaches 60 to 70. It could be artifacting, which is often caused by overheating graphics cards, but it could also be a problem with your LCD controller, LCD cables, or LCD display itself. The yellowish white thing doesn't seem to me like a graphics chip issue, it seems more like a discolored LCD panel. The lines may be artifacting or a display issue.

Does your laptop have a VGA or HDMI/DVI out port? If so, connect an external monitor to it, turn off the laptop's built in display, and see if the artifacting/discoloration shows up on the external monitor. If it does, then your GPU is messed up, if not, it's most likely your laptop's LCD display or display controller.

[ngreenwood6]

Yeah I agree with calcprogrammer1 it sounds more like an lcd issue than the graphics chip. It could be the lcd itself or the cables, it isnt the inverter. I would do like calcprogrammer said and hook it up to an external monitor and see if you get the same issue. If you do it is more than likely the graphics chip, but I have seen processors cause video to show artifacts. So it could also be your processor going bad from overheating. Let us know the results of the external monitor and we can possibly help.

[CalcProgrammer1]

Yeah, since artifacting is a chip problem, the video output line will contain the scrambled lines and such, so any monitor (internal panel, VGA CRT or LCD, TV [if equipped with TV output], or DVI/HDMI [if equipped]) connected to the chip will show the lines. However, if the chip is fine (the external monitor doesn't have the lines), then it is most likely a problem with your LCD panel. It could be the cable going from the motherboard to the screen, it could be the chip that decodes the signal and controls the panel, or it could be the ultra-thin ribbon cables that connect to each individual pixel row and column (if it's a single row or column of corrupted pixels, this may be the likely problem).