First off, apologies up front for this NOT being an Eve post, although this does explain why I’ve been inactive over the last week.

First up, last Friday my nephew came to visit. I don’t see him anywhere near enough, so I thought it would be best if I ‘unplugged’ for a bit, although I did manage to go on two roams with HellFleet on the Saturday and Sunday. He was content enough playing on my PS3, so he didn’t mind. The rest of the week though, we just chilled, playing games and shit like that.

He went back home today, so I planned to get some Eve time in. Turned my computer on, turned my laptop on… huh. Ok, it’s not booting up. I kick it into Safe Mode, and it boots up fine. I look around and can’t see anything wrong with any set-ups, so I restart it in normal mode. That’s when I notice vertical blue lines on the Vaio startup ‘splash’ screen, followed by a screen full of ááá’s. Weird. On a hunch, I go back into Safe Mode and disable the graphics adaptor, then reboot. I still get the weird screens, but it does boot up into Windows. Nice. The screen looks fine as well. Perfect. So I change the screen resolution from the rediculous 800×600, to a more manageable setting… and notice that I now have vertical blue lines appearing on my screen permanantly, but only on dark parts of the screen. If I open up google reader, that is all in white, then the blue lines disappear.

I initially thought this was a graphics card issue, but I’m beginning to think it’s not. For one, it’s affecting both my main card, and the default one (or whatever it uses when the main one is disabled). And for two, I don’t think a graphics card error would produce a screen full of á’s on startup. So what I’m doing now is backing up everything important, then I’ll probably do a complete system recovery, although that won’t be until tomorrow.

So, to recap;
Main GFX adapter on – Blue lines on startup screen, screen full of á’s, then doesn’t boot after the windows loading screen.
Main GFX adapter off – Same as above, only it boots Windows fine, and the blue lines are there permanently, but only on dark backgrounds.

Does anyone have any idea or advice on this? Would doing a system recovery help, or am I screwed?

Edit: Apparently, when I was backing up my stuff last night, my laptop decided to fix itself. I’m going to give it a week or so to give it chance to settle, but for now, it all looks good.