Dell E6400 Display issue - "doubling up" intermittently

Question

I've got a Dell E6400 It's suddenly developed an intermittent fault with the display

Every now and again, it seems to boot up with "double vision" By that I mean, its split horizontally, with each half showing the same thing, but with low resolution, and looks grainy - if that makes sense (I will try to get a couple of pictures if I can)

I haven't changed any hardware or anything.

I have re-built windows, to see if that fixed the problem, it didn't.

I've upgraded the BIOS to see if that would help, still same problem.

I'm out of ideas :-(

Update:

It seems to do it less now, but if i pick up the laptop at a funny angle, shake it, it flickers purple colours.... then display dies all together until reboot...

The graphics card it part of the mother board, so not sure what's happened there... It's the nvidea card - meant to be very reliable

Answer 1

What graphics card does it have? If you've got an onboard graphics adapter as well as a PCI/PCIEx card, make sure the onboard one is disabled...

It could be an issue with either the graphics card or the VGA cable (presuming it's VGA as you're less likely to have this issue with a graphics adapter which supports DVI). Have you tried a different cable? If that makes no difference, I'd say it's time for a new card.

If you've rebuilt Windows, and tried the latest drivers (which you haven't said you've done), then it's most likely a hardware issue.