Haha, some of you might remember my Help with friends laptop thread, or maybe I posted that on an alt... Erhm, eh nvm... Anyways, my mom's laptop, again this is just a description from her of what happened-

Apparently it just randomly popped up a bunch of lines on the screen, and then it turned off. And now it wont start up, she tries and just a white screen pops up. She's waited a few hours and it still just shows a white screen.


Sorry I don't have any more info, but tomorrow I will plug it into a monitor, and see for myself what is wrong.


Thanks guys!

virus, infected bios dude you laptop is a gona.
take in to a hardware store and they will flash the board.

She says that it's been doing that every once in a while when she turned it on it'd just be a white screen but she'd restart it and it'd work. We're gonna call dell tech support if I don't know the problem.

Have you tried checking the cooling system? Perhaps the problem is that the laptop is overheating.

Still haven't gone over there to see my self DX, anyways she says it's been off for awhile, and anyways this was after a week of not using it at all, also she even reseated the memory by reading online. I'm just gonna go with it's hardware problem and tell her to take it to get fixed. Open to suggestions though.

Since it shows crazy stuff on the screen it might be a problem with the graphics adapter or with the laptop LCD screen (dying inverter?)
I would recommend you to test the laptop by plugging an external LCD Monitor into the VGA connector, specially when it's showing the white screen. See if everything is being displayed both on the laptop LCD and on the external LCD monitor.

Well the fans dont come on or anything and the white screen has colored vertical lines going through it in random places...

Sounds like a graphics card failure.

Not much you can do about that, especially for laptops.

Same thing happened to me, well sorta. That happened then it went black and wouldn't turn on even when on the charger. Anywho, long story short, I had to trash it. Good luck with it though.

that was never the question. even if its a SERIOUS software problem you can still get into the bios.

ofc its hardware.
how old is the laptop?
pc's capacitors and shit start swelling after a few years, and as always, everythings worse when it comes to laptops.
my dads been having a similar issue lately with his pc.
possibly time to get a new one.

otherwise its overheated and seriously fuNked up the cpu, hdd or gfx card...

basically its not something that YOU can fix, take it to a technician.