I have an acer aspire 1800. From boot, there are 2 thick horizontal black bands and 2 white bands running from the top to the bottom of the screen. No image is present in these bands. Other bands are there but they show a faded image. The rest of the LCD is fine and backlit. Do I need a new LCD or could there be another solution.

The laptop image is fine on an external monitor so I dont think its the graphics.

Any help would be appreciated.

Did you ever find a solution to your problem or did anyone ever suggest one later?

My IBM R52 ThinkPad has just developed a similar color-band problem but with just two vertical bands. The display was perfect the last time I used the computer but without so much as moving the thing, when I opened it to use it today, exactly 5cm in from the left edge was a 5cm black, top-to-bottom band followed by an adjacent white one, also 5cm. To the left and right of this pair of bands the display is perfect.

Each time I have rebooted to see if anything might change, the display starts out the same way but sometimes with the black and white positions reversed. Then one or the other or both bands turn into an array of very narrow stripes of different colors. The right band sometimes has started flickering for a while, with the white almost disappearing and allowing the normal screen behind to show through, but then the solid, opaque white comes back. One time one of the bands was a consistent bluish color instead of black or white.

From the other posts on display aberrations, my best guess is that the problem is a defective display cable, bad video card [ATI Radeon X300], or a loosened connection. The ThinkPad support site has nothing on the problem that I could find. Any suggestions?