Okay, so my HP zd8000 is ~3 years old. I took it apart last week because it kept shutting down on itself (overheating I think). I attempted to clean off most of the hardened dust on the fans. So far it stopped shutting down on itself.

Today (exactly a week ago when I last opened it up), I got these weird turquoise bars all over the screen. Here, let me try and show some photos.




I think I'm probably going to just going to turn it off again, take a shower, open it up again and look for the video card.

HP zd8000 Laptop
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80 GHz (2 CPUs)
ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600

AND FOR A SUPER FANTASTIC "OOOOO" EFFECT!

SpeedFan reads:
HD0: 32°C
Temp1: 66°C

This is just a suggestion. You can take it or leave it.

You could Download and burn a SLAX live CD. Boot up using CDROM as first boot Device. See if your turquoise bars disappear. Then you will know if it is a Windows driver problem or a Hardware Problem with your video card. Easier than disassembling Laptop again.

Just a suggestion. If you decide to try this. Burn the ISO that is downloaded as a ISO IMAGE

Do you have the same effect when you start in Safe Mode?

I haven't tried safe mode.

Okay, I spent like 6 hours taking apart the laptop. Cleaned everything up (to the best of my ability). The fans are still a little bit "antiqued." However, I did notice that my fans got a little bit quieter, but this is a topic for another time.

Alright, this time the checkered boxes are there for a bit and then it disappears. I'm starting to question whether or not it's hardware related because when it does disappear, it's just "smeared" on the screen.

I don't know if you guys have ever experienced it, but say when something crashes back to desktop, sometimes you have to clear the screen with your mouse or by opening a maximized window.

As of right now, I don't know what's the main cause, but I'm going to try rokytnji's method.

Safe Mode would determine if it is a driver issue.

Ok, the distro I recommended is just a Live CD. You have to go through a lot of hoops to install it. That is why I recommmended it. All operations, Internet, Operating system, Video etc...... will run off of your CD Drive instead of the hard drive. Think of it as running Windows off a cd instead of the Hardrive. If your video is fine then you can start delving into Windows Video Drivers for your chipset on your video card. Plus having a CD operating system for free is kinda cool to have in my opinion. This won't affect your Windows install one bit. Have fun with it.

Edit: or you can try jephrees method also. He is the man when it comes to Windows.

The thing I hate about my video driver (ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600), I remember like last year, I tried to update it. To my surprise, apparently my driver wasn't included in any of the updates. I had to use some sort of work around to get the Catalyst program to update it, but it ended up being buggy after awhile. I formatted the HD probably back in April, and as of right now the driver is basically the stock driver.

You need the driver from HP and not ATI.

As of right now, the checkered patterns aren't appearing...for now.

Should I still carry out with testing Safe Mode, the Linux CD, and a driver update?

What Safe Mode does is load the Windows VGA driver rather than either ATI or HP.

If the problem persisted in Safe Mode then it is more than likely a hardware problem.

If you want to update the driver go to HP:

http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html

You can try Automatic detect there or your model which brings up 45 options:

http://h20180.www2.hp.com/apps/Looku...query=+zd8000+