For the past couple of weeks, my laptop (a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo PA 2548) has been behaving erratically with regard to its display.

It started a little over two weeks ago when, out of the blue, when I booted the computer, instead of a normal screen I was instead faced with a plain white one, the right half of which gradually faded to a dark grey. After forcing a shutdown and rebooting several times, to no avail, I began to ask around and was told varying things, ranging from it being a problem with the inverter, to a screen problem, to the graphics card. Since then, it had begun to respond occasionally, booting into Windows normally, but I had to keep it in Sleep Mode overnight as it was a shot in the dark as to whether it would boot up again if I shut down completely.

In the last day or two, it's developed a new behaviour in which it will run normally, but then the screen will freeze, flicker, and then suddenly 'jump' as if beginning to work again, only to take on an appearance as if someone has wiped the screen from side to side or top to bottom (or vice versa). After a few episodes of this, it stopped booting normally completely and instead boots (in Normal Mode) to a black screen. The outline of the taskbar appears, though without the clock or start menu, as does the outline of any menus that would normally appear if I click on where I assume anything to be (eg the start menu). Nothing works as such, and the Task Manager doesn't appear at all, which means I have to force a shut down and restart in Safe Mode.

The odd thing is, when I boot into Safe Mode, everything seems to function correctly, though obviously with the usually Safe Mode limitations. I'm pretty much a novice when it comes to this sort of thing, but as I've been quoted £60 just to have a look at the computer, I'd like to have an idea of what may be wrong before I dish out the money, in case it's something I can fix myself.

Thanks in advance everyone!