Diagnosing a laptop display problem

[afaf12]

A friend of mine has a Samsung RV520 laptop. It has weird screen issues. Display had a horizontal line 1/3 from top of the screen, as can be seen in images. Everything below the line was distorted and duplicated (in a different color though).

See for yourself:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/401/dsc00719o.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/834/dsc00718ua.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/268/dsc00717us.jpg/

After restarting the laptop multiple times, line has moved to 2/3 from top of the screen. Duplication effect is no more, but the lower 1/3 of screen is still in distorted colors (pink and blue mostly).

After some googling, it appears that horizontal/vertical lines, distortion and other screen issues are often caused by the display lcd cable or the lcd screen itself.

Any other ideas? This happening on bios rules out most issues I could think of.

 

[gidgiddonihah]

It must be a hardware issue. The first thing I was thinking was a driver, and didn't even notice that it appeared in the BIOS :/.

I would check the cable connections. There should be online tutorials (check YouTube) on how to replace the screen and you can get to the cable that way. If it is still having problems you may have to replace the screen or it could be the graphics card is going bad and displaying artifacts.