[dragonwitch504]

Hi
I am totally computer illiterate, but have a friend that knows alot. I am pre-searching for answers and help.

I have a Toshiba A55-S1063, using XP. The screen has started jumping and turning dark. I can still see in the background, but not much.

Is there any hope for recovery?
Thank you so much for your time.

[JohnWill]

Sounds like the inverter that powers the backlight or the backlight is dying/dead. It's not expensive to fix if you can do the repair yourself, the inverter is the most likely suspect, about $20 or so for the part.

[dragonwitch504]

Thank you for answering........will this stop the jumping screen too??

[JohnWill]

That depends on how it's "jumping".

[dragonwitch504]

It is jumping so bad that I can't read anything. It doesn't do it right away....after 5 minutes or so it starts jumping and there are horizontal lines running up and down the screen and after a little while longer it goes dark. I can see the screensavers in there if i look closely. My friend thinks it could be the video card?
Again I say thanks!!

[bp936]

On my older Toshiba I had the same problem, Yoshibas are hard to take apart. but before I ditched it, I reinstalled the original Toshiba disks (WINXP) and everything came back to life and is still running. I don;t know what happened, I do not know about inverters.
|Also luckily I always mostly backup anything important asap. Thanks to JohnW now I backup onto 2 different USB drives.

Programs I wanted to use again, I had to reinstall.
This might work for you or try John;s recommendation.

[JohnWill]

If you are getting lines and then it goes dark and the image is faint but visible, that's most likely electrical noise from the failing inverter or backlight.

Since that's cheap to fix, and the video if it's dying is a motherboard replacement, I'd be doing the $20 repair first.

[dragonwitch504]

Thank you to both of you for answering my questions.
My "tech" person is not available today, but I will show him your suggestions and see what we can do here.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!