Hello, yesterday in the middle of doing nothing in particular my laptop decided to only output a really dark, flickery signal, its not the monitor or the wires because ive tried different sources and they both work fine. I suspect my graphics card may have commited suicide although the normal laptop screen is working fine its just not outputting a good signal to monitors. Is there something im obviously doing wrong before i rip the poor thing apart and look for faulty wires or broken pins inside the laptop itself?

Any help or ideas would be much appreaciated as im the kind of person who tends to find there are 15 screws and a small but important looking thiny-majigger left over when they take something apart and put it back together.

You have your laptop hooked to an external monitor ?
The external is what's giving you the problem?

You have your PC Spec's listed-- but did not check the "allow others to see my specs" box in User CP-- all we see is a blank drop menu.

If you can fix that it will help.

yea sorry i didnt make that clear its an external monitor that wont display properly, its odd because you can see stuff, but you have to really squint because its so dark and flickering. The normal laptop display is working fine. Also i havnt got my specs on because im talking from my work PC and its a home laptop i'm trying to fix (shhhh dont tell the boss)
Its an HP Pavilion DV1000 notebook PC with a mobile intel(R) 945GM express chipset - i think thats the graphics card, or am i completely wrong? (sorry im a software kinda guy, hardware confuses and worrys me)

That any help? lol please im getting desperate i need to see the latest episode of house and its saved on my laptop

A chipset is not a graphics card-- it is a chip that serves as the "router" for the motherboard--
everything passes through it-- CPU calls for RAM --or Video signal is transferred from Video adapter to the monitor-- so it's speed influences performance
Due to size/space issues notebook PC's usually use a video adapter that is part of the motherboard-- built in.

How do you have the external connected to the Laptop... what type of cable?

standard analogue vga cable, but ive tried putting in another one of the same kind so i dont think thats the problem... thankyou for the motherboard tip, i was quite confused by the specs, i'll post what the motherboard is as soon as i get home.