my screen turns into stripes help!

I have an Acer Aspire1500 running vista, it is a few years old and recently it started acting up: First it would just turn into a blue screen or a lit screen. Then it started getting vertical stripes, they vary in color black and white, green and light green or red and pink black and grey, it seems to pick up the color of the page i’m on before it turns striped. I reformatted using the alt+F10 function, it did this more often before i reformatted, now it will run for a while then stripes! I have been searching online but found nothing. I restored it with sys restore in DOS with F8 rstrui.exe command as well, and i cleaned it all out. Has anyone ever had this issue and how do i fix it.

 

If these are your general specs - http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/notebook/0000/Acer/Aspire1500/Aspire1500sp2.shtml - you have a separate video card as opposed to on-board graphics.
Had a similar situation with a Dell Inspiron and it was the video card failing. I'm not familiar with Acer diagnostics but if you can run them, it will probably show errors in the card memory. I ended up having the vid card and motherboard replaced in the Dell but that was while it was still under warranty. Someone else may have some diagnostic tests you can run to see if there is a specific fix for your comp.