Laptop display digial blizzard -- help!

[Sugarman]

I have a Toshiba Satellite. It's about 3 years old and has always worked fine. It's running Windows Vista.

Starting a few weeks ago, I would be working on it. Then randomly, the display would freeze into digital blizzard -- sort of like the "snow" you see on your TV when there's no signal.

This is accompanied by a slight clicking sound at the top left of the machine. And then I have to hold down the power key to restart the machine. When it restarts, it's fine again -- for a while.

It's starting to happen with greater frequency, which worries me.

The first time it happened was when I was watching a live stream of a UFC match online.

Can anyone suggest what might be going wrong here ... and what to do about it?

I would really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Chris

 

[foothead]

Have you ever cleaned the dust out of it? I suggest doing that first.
Can you read the Windows event viewer, and post the error code on here?

 

[GibsonSGKing]

Sounds to me like a bad solder joint to the screen. Happened to one of my HP monitors.