Ok so i recently purchased a unit off ebay (sony vaio pcg-z1wa) and it has garbled video both on the laptop and on an external monitor. I opened the unit to check all the connections and plugs and parts and everything seems to be properly set and in working order. The monitor was even opened and examined and none of the cables are being caught in the hinges.There was no ram in the unit however (was advertised to have 512mb stick of ram). Could the unit not having ram cause this or make it fail to post or load graphics drivers? Now here's the tricky part, at times it starts up displaying the sony logo and tries to boot. After a little while, the screen has all these little boxes and/or lines and you can't see anything on the screen. When the screen does display anything its beautiful and has no dead pixels or anything.
That's kinda tricky to troubleshoot. It would be helpful if you could provide us with a photo or two.
If there's no ram in the laptop, i doubt it would let you boot pass the BIOS. So i suggest adding some ram into the laptop first before going on with the troubleshooting.
Also, if you could boot up to windows, and if your problem still appearing in windows, you could try reinstalling the monitor and graphics driver first from here:
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