# Intermittent vertical pink lines on screen



## jamespaulritter

Hello all,

I have a gateway 17 inch laptop M675 running XP home. I occasionally get pink vertical lines 1 pixel wide on my LCD. It seems to be unrelated to the laptops temperature or current activity. It happened occasionally last month and now happens half the time. I pressed F2 at start up to see if I could look in the bios and I had the pink lines there too when trying to enter set up. I plugged another monitor into my laptop but the monitor wouldn't display anything, just blank. Otherwise my laptop acts perfect. 

The flickering lines sometimes take up the whole screen top to bottom left to right, sometimes they only take up a part of the screen. The are mostly present in the light colored areas. 

I have read every post that Google could lead me to which showed technicians blaming video drivers, LCD ribbons, video cards and LCD screens. I have tried to update the bios, update the driver, roll back the driver and have also taken the laptop apart and checked the LCD cable or ribbon to see if it was visibly damaged.

It seems like a very common problem from what I could tell on the Google search with not 1 instance of a user ever coming back to explain what the issue ended up being. I am posting here to ask for advice but also to place info in cyberspace on a fix for this specific common issue. I have an appointment with an expert computer doctor but I would love to solve this before I begin to rack up repair fees. Thanks.


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## jamespaulritter

Well the computer doctor put a new LCD (screen) on my beloved gateway today and the problem was not solved. I know some have said. "It is the screen", others have said, "It is the LCD ribbon. Still others point to the BIOS and some even swear it is the graphics card, graphics driver and a few stake their lives that it is the mother board.

I told the laptop doctor to keep it till it was fixed!!! We will have a solution for this common problem....... I will come back to this forum and tell the world what causes the infamous pink red vertical lines on the screen!!!! We will have a solution,,,,,,,,, the information will be in print,,, in cyberspace,,,, for all to see,,,, there will be an answer for this unresolved common problem!!!!!

Every technician and user in podunk lame-ville will be able to do a google search and find this post informing them on the issue of the vertical, intermittent pink, red lines on their LCD screen so that they may fix it easily without swapping out every single component of their machine in an uninformed, unintelligent shot in the dark at fixing the problem!!!

Unless there are several causes for vertical pink lines on a screen,,,,,,, then were all $#@&^*%@#!!!!!

Ha ha chuckle chuckle,,,,,, I'll be back in a few days to let you all know what fixes this on my laptop. Thanks.


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## Knightsman

Graphics card...


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## jamespaulritter

Alright,,,, we have 1 vote for the graphics card,,,,,,,, do I hear any other bidders?????? I myself am leaning towards a bad spot on the mother board if that makes sense,,,,,,,, I am not a computer guy so this is a layman's guess don't ya know


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## Knightsman

Its more than likely integrated.  So graphics card bad = motherboard bad


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## jamespaulritter

Well they have had the dam thing for 2 weeks now and have completely disassembled it. The have replaced the LCD screen and the LCD ribbon. The have reset the cmos whatever that is and they say they are afraid to update the bios. So I think you are right. They say it has to be the mother board. 

My options are:

(1) They flash the bios and the problem is solved and I'm out no extra money.

(2) They flash the bios and it kills the mother board so I spend $300.00 for a new one and it fixes the pink lines.

(3) They flash the bios and it kills the mother board so I spend $300.00 for a new one and it doesnt fix the pink lines.

(4) I just buy the mother board and it fixes the problem also I'm out $300.00

(5) I just buy the mother board and it doesnt fix the problem and I pay $75.00 for a restocking fee.

(6) I pay $700.00 to buy a refurbished laptop that is as good as mine was before the pink lines.

(7) I try nothing and just use the thing with intermittent pink lines.


I vote for 7. 

Its no wonder no one has ever come back to any forum to update the thread and explain what really fixed their pink line problem. Its because the problem is not worth fixing!!!!


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## champoy

thanks a lot!!!!!!!!!any answers???????????????///


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## kcg

My mother's Toshiba started doing what sounds like the same thing but I'm not sure.  These are vertical thin pink lines one pixel wide and alternating each line and they appear on bright white portions of the screen.  The boot screen looks fine and it seems that anything of certain shades of white and blue seem to be the only parts affected.  I even boot the system up on Ubuntu and the same thing happened so I assume that it is a video card/motherboard issue.

BUT I FOUND A SOLUTION!!!!

I hope this is the problem everyone else is getting, because if it is, the workaround was rather simple.

Figuring it was bright white portions of the screen that were affected, I went into the video driver settings for color correction (the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600) and just dropped the brightness down to 96-98 and it all went away.  From there I tweaked things and eventually went into the advanced settings where I found the perfect balance for everything.

Saved the profile and voila everything looks fine.

I sincerely hope this helps someone out there.

Cheers.


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## mlesniak

*I have the same symptoms*

I just thought I would add my bit to the thread, even though it is several years old. 
In may case I have a HP w1907v monitor and I get a single pixel wide vertical pink line down the right side of my screen, not far from the right edge. This usually occurs on start up and sometimes disappears after several minutes of use. 
I have concluded that this must be the monitor causing this because I get exactly the same symptom when I use the same monitor on a different computer. 
Therefore this rules out BIOS, graphics card, motherboard, in fact anything which is specific to the computer as opposed to the monitor.
Resetting the monitor does not make any difference.
I suspect that it might be a temperature thing but I have no idea exactly how temperature affects the display.


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