I have an Acer Aspire 9500, with 17" monitor. Over the past few months it's developed 4 vertical lines that dont go away. I expect more lines to appear...these came one at a time. But in the last week or so, the monitor has gone blank, a solid color, not always the same color I don't think. All I can do to correct ii, is cut the power off. Is this repairable? Where do I start? Laptop is over 1 year old, but not 2 years old.

The first thing would be to hook up an external monitor and see if the lines migrate to the external display. You should also check and see if the bios startup portion of the boot sequence has the lines in the display as well. Use the Fn key and the display switching key (usually the F6 key) to see if you can run the external monitor and the notebooks lcd at the same time, and then compare the differences.

well, can you connect it to a monitor to see if it's outputting normally? if you can and it shows the same symptoms, then the integrated video is gone, and you'd be better off getting a new laptop, the cost for replacement motherboards are more than what older laptops are worth.

Thanks, I'll try plugging it into a monitor today, and post up results later.