Hello,
My Toshiba Satellite Laptop has horizontal lines running across the screen upon start up. I can not see my desktop underneath the lines. The problem was intermittent, and is now happening daily.

To stop the lines and display my desktop on the screen, I have to swing my laptop screen back and forth until a picture occurs. At first, it was a either simple readjustment back or forth to find the spot when the desktop screen would come back up. Or simply squeezing the left bottom corner of the screen would stop the horizontal lines. Lately, I would have to swing it back and forth.

Thanks for all your help

Sound like a Etch-A-Sketch .lol

shake it a little bit maybe it will fix it...get it you erase a etch-a-sketch by shaking it....o well...umm yea bye

That really does sound like a Etch-a-Sketch!

Joking aside, I would contact Toshiba. Sounds like your LCD has some serious problems ;-).

umm if you got it delivered make sure they didnt replace it with one of those high-tek etch-a-sketch that look like Monitors, trust me I've seen some that do.

Sounds to me like you have a connection issue with the ribbon connector. I had a laptop that only displayed the desktop when you opened it a small bit, when you opened it all the way the screen went all white anyway it was out of waranty so I re-seated the connector onto the mainboard and it seemed to solve it. incidently the processor also needed regular re-seating, every now and then the laptop would just keel over and not even boot I found removing and reinserting the processor borught it back for a while. Stangest laptop I ever owned.

I am having the same problem as described above. The only difference is that I have no problem at all when running windows, it is just when I run games after 5 minutes or so multiple horizontal lines start up and gets worse and worse until the screen is unreadable. I move the screen back and forth and or press on it (from behind) and it sometimes comes good for a bit. Any ideas or how to fix it? BTW it is a Compaq Evo N800v Notebook. Thanks in advance.

Some more info, updated the bios and now instead of the lines it goes black after a while and moving the screen doesn't always work! Any info would be great!

i used to own a compaq armada notebook ...
after a few months of use the screen used to start going haywire ... got it fixed outside(too risky to spoil the laptop by myself)..the problem was in the ribbon connector .had to get that replaced

Two problems I've had:
- The ribbon cable, they do wear out and they cause intermittant problems.
- The GPU has been shorted, or is on the way out. Had a HP laptop with a screw loose inside (don't know how it got there) and it shorted over the GPU before I found it. This meant the GPU shoved big vertical lines over everything and the situation degraded over time to leave a VERY faint Windows behind hundreds of lines.

So, either of these ways it's probably hardware, and unless you've got any experience I would send it out for repair.

If it's a software problem then I'm afraid I don't have any recent experience

Good luck!