Laptop with green lines and dots on screen

nathan4102

Honorable
Nov 3, 2013
162
0
10,690
TLDR at bottom for lazy people :p

I had a buddy bring me his laptop because he said it had green lines going down it. It is a HP Pavillion DV9000 with a Geforce 8600M GS Graphics chip (Thats what device manager told me after I installed a driver)

Anyways, when I first got it, it had green lines going down, but they only showed over white parts of the screen. My first thought was to update the graphics driver, but oddly, there was no GFX chip or card listed in the device manager. I went to HP's driver site for the laptop, but they didn't have any GFX drivers for windows 7, so I had to get them off Nvidea.

I basically had to guess what the GFX chip was, and when I installed the driver, it woudln't let me boot normally any more, the screen was filled with black and white lines. When I booted into safe mode and checked device manager, I saw the Gefore 8600M GS.

So I uninstalled all GFX drivers by uninstalling in the control panel, and using DriverSweeper, then installed these drivers. Now the screen is filled with little green dots that only show on white surfaces, and if you reboot, the screen stays blank after the windows loading screen, so I have to go back to safe mode.

The green lines and dots also show before windows loads, in bios and the splash screen.

Note: I've also tried the driver from windows update, same result.

TLDR

1. Got Pavillion DV9000
2. Had green lines going down
3. Updated driver
4. Has green dots all over, and doesn't display anything after windows loading screen half the time

What can I do to fix this? Is it 100% a LCD screen issue? I really don't want to tell him its the screen if it's something I can fix. And the fact that the green stuff changed when I switched the drivers gave me a bit of hope, so maybe theres a way to fix? :)

Thanks a hundred million times to whoever manages to help me out :D
 
Solution
It's very likely not an LCD issue, video card is probably bad.
Also, do not use the nVidia drivers for laptops, get the drivers from HP even if they are out of date. If it does not have Win 7 drivers, you can try the Vista ones. Running the base nVidia drivers for laptops is not supported and can cause issues.

Tyk3

Honorable
Nov 24, 2013
85
0
10,660
highly likely to be a Hardware issue. GPU or screen.

To verify that it is a screen problem, connect your laptop to an external monitor and see if the green dots/lines appear there as well. if the external monitor also shows green lines or dots, your GPU has gone bad. Motherboard might need to be replaced.

If external monitor doesn't shows any such problems, use the laptop to do some light gaming on that external machine, for an hour or two. This will confirm that GPU is working fine, and it is a LCD problem.
 
It's very likely not an LCD issue, video card is probably bad.
Also, do not use the nVidia drivers for laptops, get the drivers from HP even if they are out of date. If it does not have Win 7 drivers, you can try the Vista ones. Running the base nVidia drivers for laptops is not supported and can cause issues.
 
Solution

AlexandreMoron

Reputable
Oct 29, 2014
2
0
4,510
I think I had the same problem. Green dots all over the screen (and I tested the screen: clear).
I changed my screen configuration on windows from 60hz to 50hz and its seems to have worked.

Also, I saw a guy on youtube who baked his gpu and he sad it helped.

Good luck