Hi all,

I desperately need some advice/guidance ... I have an Acer 800lci laptop with linux & XP on it. Everything was going great and I was really enjoying working on linux for my day to day work.

Just a few days ago though the moment I booted into the laptop I got a garbled screen .. everything...even the centrino logo and the Acer boot screen were completely messed up. I dont have a digicam so cant give screen shots but I have found something similar on the net at the link below (no solution though)

http://bellet.info/photos/2003/Aug/10Aug18:10/

My screen is very similar to the above but much worse.. all characters on the bootup screen and the scrolling messages when logging into linux are displayed as non-keyboard characters randomly mixed with keyboard characters so that I cant read anything on the screen.


I have tried to find out what the error may be and the only things I could find on google were that the graphics card (I have an ATI M9000 card) may have overheated. However I could not find any solution to get around it.

Since I could not find anything on the net I am putting my case to the gurus and friends at linuxquestions.. has anyone come across this error? I am sure it is a hardware error but how do I go about rectifying it?

If it is something to do with the graphics card please can someone tell me if the card in my laptop can be replaced? and how much it will cost. The laptop is unfortunately not in warranty but it is a sweet machine and I desperately hope I dont have to get rid of it.

Please guys & gals.. could you help me? I am really worried about my laptop and hope someone can come up with some solution.

Thank you all again for reading through this message.

Quo

I know you have a really bad problem but please, don't post the same thread in various forums (I mean, inside LQ)... it isn't nice.

Yes you are right of course.. just panicked I guess.. I do apologize.

Quo