Wife's laptop started displaying rainbow lines and crashing with crazy errors, won't boot outside of safe mode. The lines distort and move when you move the mouse over them, sometimes the screen spazzes out completely. Variety of errors displayed during initial boot. It's an old HP Dv6. Any ideas? Motherboard, Graphics Card, blahblah? Worth trying to fix or just ditch it?

7/15/2015 1:23:31 PM

Have you uninstalled the video adapter in the device manager and rebooted? Worth a shot.

Otherwise if the video card is accessible and you can get a $10 one on ebay I'd probably try that if you still have a use for the machine. Fuck a motherboard.

7/15/2015 1:41:18 PM

Very rarely is the video card separate than the motherboard unless it's a fairly large desktop replacement or gaming laptop. You can usually find cheap motherboards for older laptops online. Otherwise you'll need to buy a new laptop.

--Probably not the video driver as you're seeing it during boot. I'm guessing the connection between the motherboard and the display panel.

[Edited on July 15, 2015 at 2:17 PM. Reason : s]

7/15/2015 2:16:34 PM

I had similar display trouble with an ancient thinkpad, I was able to VGA to a monitor and have slightly more legible screens, not a permanent fix but good if you want to move data before throwing it away.

7/16/2015 12:08:34 PM