I wonder if anybody can tell me what my problem is. I have a dell Inspiron 9300 and it was working fine until a couple of days ago when I was working and without any warning about 5cm of the screen suddenly turned white in vertical strip from top to bottom.
I tried restarting, I tried all my antivirus programs and I tried system restore but no luck.
This vertical white strip comes on from start before windows XP has loaded, so i am sure it is a hardware problem. The rest of the screen is fine but all folders and files in the same area are hidden although they can still be accessed. I can move the cursor as it passes under the white bar, no problem.
Does anybody know what is going on, any help, greatly appreciated.

Probably a bad lcd screen

Not just probably. Definitely and those problems are not user fixable.

There is an outside chance that there's a ribbon cable kink/issue that can be sorted by a repair shop - but not usually by a user.