Dell Inspiron 5000GT - Messed Up Display

[RituallyPure]

I have a Dell Inspiron 5000(GT) that I purchased in September of 2000. It has the following specs:

Pentium III 600Mhz with SpeedStep
64MB RAM
6GB Hard Drive
14.1" XGA Display
Windows 98 SE

The screen flashes pink on bootup, and a lot of the pixels on the screen are read, or shaded red. When it gets into Windows, I have the proprietary "Windows 98" blue background, and the entire thing is pink. The Start Menu & Task bar looks generally okay, but has some icons and such shaded red on it. It's "usable", but it looks absolutely horrific.

My brother was using the system at the time, and said that he was just typing on MSN Messenger when the screen turned pink. I've rebooted & allowed the system to sit (shut off) for about an hour - with no results. :S

My main concern here is expense - I'm not in a place financially to be spending extravagant amounts of cash on this thing, and despite my PC experience - am not comfortable tearing this thing open. My warranty on this notebook has also already expired.

What should I do?!

[edit] If I pull UP (ex. lift the system up, or put pressure on the system upwards by grabbing the screen and pulling up), the screen goes back to normal. If I relieve the pressure, it goes back to pink... ?!!

R.P.

[woodbutcher]

Welcome to TechIMO
Is there perhaps a ribbon cable that runs from the mobo to the display?
Could have worn through with age from opening and closing the notebook?

WB

[RituallyPure]

It would suprise me if something is worn out... This thing definately gets lots of use.

I just hope it's not an expensive problem.

R.P.

[woodbutcher]

If it is something like that I would think that the replacement part would be somewhat reasonable, oh wait, it's a DELL.
Really though, you might want to carefully pull it apart enough to find the problem. Unfortunatly, if you send it in for repairs it will probably cost more to fix then it's worth.

WB

[RituallyPure]

I'm an inquisitive guy, but I don't want to pull this thing apart and then not be able to put it back together.

RP

[RituallyPure]

Update: Moved the system to a different room. Turned it on, noticed that when the screen was at a 90 degree angle, it was pink. If I pushed it back to a larger angle, it would return to normal color... But then after I moved the screen a couple more times, it went nearly completely black (I can still see VERY vague stuff on the screen. Can't read text, though..) and the lights on the screen aren't operable....

[RituallyPure]

Problem Solved...

I cracked open the system, which was suprisingly easy, except for this one exterior bezel which seemed absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to get off. The ZIF connector for the monitor was basically just resting in the socket, so I removed it and reseated it properly and everything works just dandy now.

Thanks.