When starting my Inspiron 8100 it sometimes (usually now)give me garbled video. Instead of showing the "Dell Inspiron" initial screen, it displays a 2/3 black and 1/3 gray screen (bottom 1/3). This gray area gets progressively lighter as the computer goes through the startup until the computer reaches the point at which windows has fully loaded (never shows boot info or XP boot screen). Originally it would boot to windows normally from here, but now usually will give garbled display that is reddish or greenish, offset, larger than normal, and more pixelated than normal (really blockier than fuzzy looking).

This startup problem can normally be remedied by starting the computer with the lcd all the way open (tilted back as far as it will go). Computer starts up completely normally and runs fine once started without the 1/3 gray screen (has NEVER given display problems if this did not occur right at the startup).

It may be also worth noting that it that the display generally has some lack of color uniformity/artifacts in large areas of the same color (gray areas appear to have little areas of color change..). This my just be the fact that my eyes are spoiled to my new widescreen HD desktop's display and Inspiron 6000. This is barley noticable, but I just thought it may give someone some clue as to what was going on. Any help is appreciated. Any ideas? Thanks.

Adam