Laptop- major picture break-up

I have a 3 year old compaq presario 700 laptop which seems to be dying. Within 10 minutes of turning on the machine, the picture starts to distort, within a few seconds nothing can be seen except multicoloured horizontal lines and eventually blackness. The longer the machine is left off, the longer it takes for problem to arise the next time i switch on. The problem seems to occur when i tried to remove AOL( )- although that could be a coincidence.
I have tried to use the compaq recovery disc, unfortunately it says there is a problem, and the display goes before i can attempt to do anything. problem also arises in safe mode.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated, i can't afford a new laptop at the mo.

 

Sounds like you either need a reformat, or your LCD is dying. Anyone want to field a more educated guess?

 

hi,
thanks for the reply I have been unable to reformat the hard drive for sometime, I don't know why it just wont let me, it keeps coming up with the message: not possible at this time.
How would I know if it's an LCD screen problem?
Thanks again