Hi,This is my first post,I bought a second hand Samsung p29 laptop on ebay with the hope of fixing it for my son,It powers on fine but and you can hear the cd spining,but rarely does the screen turn on,I first thought it was a loose conection to the screen,but after taking the laptop apart, I can not seeing anything that should be a problem.When i do get the screen to work after about 1/2 or once 1 hour at most the laptop freezes and the screen sometimes has lines on it.Then I have to reboot and the screen does not work again.Even when plugged into a external monitor there is no joy,I have only once got it running long enough to format and reinstall windows xp thinking i could run some tests to find the problem.The CPU fan is also working fine,I though maybe it was over heating.I loaded the Radion 9000 driver to windows and hoped it would let me use the external monitor but it does not work even when the laptop screen is working.
I hope this makes since .
Please help me
Cheers...

It is apparently VGA-related issue. If it was display issue, it wouldn't freeze. It would keep running with those lines on.
No quick fixes there, I'm afraid. You bought faulty laptop.
For the external monitor use, if it doesn't have any signal on the monitor jack, then you would have to boot into OS and configure your VGA to use clone display, or set the external monitor as the primary display. I recommend the later if it is CRT monitor. First option would give you 60 Hz display, and 60 Hz is a very unpleasant thing to look at on CRT.

Its an onboard ATI Radion 9000 video with shared memory,is there anyway of adding a stand alone video card to bypass the onboard card.Can you change the onboard video with a different chip.?

With laptops - no. There are only two ways to fix it. Replace the motherboard or get new laptop. New laptop is much better and much more cost-effective solution.

I can not rule out faulty RAM, though. It is one of few replaceable parts. You should first try to reseat the RAM. If you have more than one stick, my advice would be to also try running with one at the time, to see if one of them is faulty. Hope this helps.

hi coleraine, anyway you know how to take the laptop apart then maybe you should try to boot the laptop with no cd-rom and hdd, just the mobo, cpu, and memory take it out from the case, be sure to put it on a non-metallic object so the mobo will not be shorted, then check if you can have a display, then try to put ther other peripherals one at a time to isolate any problems, if this doesn't work then the mobo got some problem...

I have similar problem , sometime my laptop (samsung p29) freeze, is only one way to get back my laptop reboot again , its drastic but works , I switching off the laptop - hold power button for least 3sec. pressing the keyboard or smashing it by hand , and pressing the power on .

it works , again for few minutes till few hours and again freeze.

i don't know where can be the problem i guess its graphics chip problem or faulty soldered joint.

anyone have the same problem and solved it ?

sorry for bad english

you are just not smashing it hard enough !! LOL