Laptop Screen Problems

My daughter just arrived home for the summer from college with her Toshiba laptop running Windows XP. Today, her screen suddenly went black -- not totally black though. If you leaned your head a certain way you could vaguely see the stuff that should have been on her screen. When we rebooted, I saw that her screen was just fine until after Windows completed loading and the hourglass stopped. The screen was just fine. And then black.

I booted up in Safe mode. Everything was just fine. Rebooted into Safe Mode with Networking (trying everything available) and it was just fine. Not knowing what the problem could be, I thought I would run a virus program. Tried to install Norton. Got an error message. Tried to run the online BitDefender. As soon as I clicked the link to even get there, the screen went black. From that point on, when I booted up in Safe Mode with Networking I got the black screen of death. Still, all is fine in the world of Safe Mode.

I know that Toshiba has random laptop screen problems, so I'm trying to determine if this is a hardware problem related to something or a software or virus problem.

Any advice?

 

See what happens when you hook it up to an external monitor?

 

excuse me corporal.....this sounds like a virus. every time he tries to do something about it ti turns black..........what kind of hard drive is in the laptop??(sata,or ide):confused do you have a good virus protection on one of your computers???

 

After fully reading the post I agree ... I have a habit of extracting relevant information ... it doesn't always work ... you would be best of posting in the Malware forum ... also do this guide first.

READ & RUN ME FIRST