Acer laptop artifacting

Hey guys, I've had my acer aspire 1681wlmi for a couple of years now, and yesterday it started to artifact horribly. Full screen corruption. If I take a screenshot there's corruption in the screenshot, so I know it's not just my monitor.

Now here is the weird part, when I plug in an analog monitor it doesn't artifact. Even if I'm running in dual monitor mode, no artifacting. I unplug the analog monitor and almost instantly it artifacts. Hook it back in and the artifacts go away.

Also, if I wiggle the built in monitor it sometimes goes away.

Finally, no matter what I set my clock speeds at, the artifacting doesn't go away.

Some relevent info, my CPU fan does not come on in Windows anymore. It runs high at POST, then doesn't come back on. It comes on as required in FC5. I took the pc apart yesterday and applied new AS5 to the CPU. The computer can run anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 minutes before the artifacts show up, after that they exist in windows, linux, and everything in between (post, grub etc).

This problem has both my room mate and I stumped, we have no idea how to fix this. Please help!

So yeah, everything from before this sentence was from a post on another forum, so to add to that, I installed speedfan and it didn't detect any fans on my system whatsoever.

 

Hi,
If you are connecting the analog monitor while the computer (laptop) is powered on, it may be causing trouble. Monitors are not meant to be "hot plugged" like a USB connection. This could be causing problems with the drivers.

Look in Control Panel -> Display -> Settings tab. There you will see the two screens depicted as #1 and #2. You can click on the pictures and in the dropdown beneath you will see the monitor and graphics card listed. When you go to a single screen, right-click on screen #2 and uncheck the "Enabled" setting (I don't have dual monitors on my Win XP machine, so I am looking at the settings in Win 98).

"If I wiggle the built-in monitor..." may suggest a loose or bad connection.

What happens if you have the second monitor attached and power it off, does the artifacting start?

Matt

 

Well, didn't try to power off the analog monitor while it was plugged in, but I don't think it matters at this point.

I found that wiggling the panel really doesn't do much, that I have to give the right-center of the bottom half (right next to the keyboard) a hard tap/hit.

I figure then that it's a loose connection somewhere in that area, and the only things that are there are the CPU and the video adapter. Today I'm going to take it apart and tighten/reseat everything I can in that general area and see what happens.

 

Just an update here, I think the problem is overheating. The laptop has been handled roughly lately, and I think that one of the thermal pads got messed up.

I've taken the laptop apart quite a few times now, oddly enough I've never really worked with thermal pads before (other than to replace them with AS5) so I didn't know the proper guidelines for them. I tried to re-use them and also to apply thermal paste to them to let them re-seal.

I've since found out that both of those are big no-no's, so this morning I removed them and am going to get some more thermal paste at lunch.

Any suggestions or comments?