Originally Posted by SparkerR

is the jack somthing I can fix? like is it sodered? -- AFAIK it needs some soldering. So if you are any good at it then may be it is an easy fix for you.

as far as the screen goes I dont remember the symptoms showing on an external monitor. if I hook the laptop up to my old trinitron and have it displaying on the laptop's LCD as well the screen on the laptop still glitches but the external monitor doesnt. the little performance hit is noticed on both screens though -- may be the glitches is a sign of a dying backlight or inverter. The performance hit is of course a result of so many things like CPU, RAM, GPU, HDD, etc.