My wife’s laptop is a Toshiba Satellite, M65-S9092 w/windows XPMedia Center Edition with a 17 inch screen.
A few months ago it started getting some horizontal green streaks that would follow the curser around and on different screens if they were all white then it would be mostly this light green. Microsoft spent a lot of effort and escalated to their top engineers but couldn’t resolve this problem. Wife lived with it and got used to it.
This week, when she would close the cover for a time and then use the mouse to bring it out of sleep, the screen would be lighted by gray and nothing on it. She would do a warm reboot and then it would be normal till next time. This happened a few times and then it would not open anything but a lighted grey screen. I tried all the standard things but nothing would bring up the desktop.
I got out another monitor and plugged it into the laptop. I booted the laptop and up came the gray lighted screen on the laptop but the monitor had the complete desktop on it, with the curser and it was operable.
Next I right clicked on the desk top and went to display then settings. It was set up for only the lap top screen. I then changed the setting to two screens and I then lost all the icons on the desktop and also the small icons on the bottom of the screen leaving just a black frame around the external monitor. Nothing changed on the lap top screen but in tipping it toward me I could see that it appeared to be doing something when I moved the mouse around or clicked it. It looked like the desktop had narrowed down to maybe an inch wide and varied to ½ inch wide, and these vertical streaks were very pale light blue. I tried all the things I know about or could think of but nothing would change. I finally shut it down and set up a standby Sony Vail desktop for her to use while I figure out what to fix in this laptop. It is pretty hard to do anything with out a desktop.
I wonder if the screen has gone bad or the graphic card? I can see the hard drive operating on boot up so that seems to be ok.
I do have a full back up of this computer on a freestanding Seagate hard drive, but it is unable to access the laptop.
I think I put 5 partitions on this laptop when it was new 4 ½ years ago using partition Magic. I have two emergency start discs I made from the partition Magic after partitioning on floppys. I plugged in a usb floppy drive but still couldn’t access the laptop with those emergency start discs.
I do have the Toshiba Recovery and applications/drivers DVD for this computer but I don’t want to format the hard drive and reinstall all the factory programs it came with as that would loose all her programs and data.
I am at the end of my knowledge. I hope Abacus Bill or someone also as knowledgeable as he is will have some ideas to try with this laptop before I give up completely,
Thanks for any help or advice.
Bebop . my email addy is in my info here.
Should also have written that this computer is 4 years old and it cost over 2000.00 new. I also bought another at the same time that was 2970.00 USD. It is still operating ok but with far less hours on it. Only used on trips where as wife's is used every day. All her programs, data, and saved emails are on it so I hate to toss it and feel like I need to fix it for her
thanks for all replies.


[This message has been edited by BEBOP (edited 06-30-2010).]