A buddy of mine has a pair of Gateway 450x4 r4 laptops. Both have basically the same issue with the video being corrupted. Problems only seem to start when you flex the lower chassis but can't be corrected by any amount of twisting after the fact.

I started troubleshooting one of them, checked screen cable and connector, same prob. Plugged in a crt monitor, still does it on crt monitor. New thermal paste on both the cpu and vid chip (radeon mobility), no help. I currently have the mobo out of it to check for dirt, shorts or whatever under it and really can't see anything glaringly obvious.

I doubt it is a rare problem with this model being I am looking at two of them doing the exact same thing. I just can't come up with any info as to if there is a fix for this, short of a mobo replacement. And fearing the problem will come right back.

If anybody has seen this happen or has seen a fix please let me know. It would be sweet to get these things fixed up as he said I can have one if I get them both working.

/braindump
Try sticking a piece of transparency film between mobo and chassis, to rule out shorts there. Also, check for any fissures (cracks) in the motherboard. Furthermore, check for blow/leaking capacitors.
/braindump

Does the problem correct itself after you re-seat the video card or cable connector(s)?

I went over the mobo with a 5x magnifier and couldn't find anything obvious. Caps all looked normal without any bulges, leaks or corrosion. The video chip is onboard so the only connection is the soldered on pins. Problem will cure itself each time you restart the machine. If left alone (completely hands off after pushing the power button) the laptop will boot and the video is fine. Any slight twisting of the chassis corrupts the video again and a restart is needed to bring it back to normal. Moving the screen, typing hard, twisting the chassis all cause the problem to show itself. It seems like it would be a failed trace or connection somewhere in the board but I'm not seeing it.

BTW. The screen is still on when it fails but everything is garbled with vertical lines, text out of place and most text converts to incoherent symbols. Does the same thing when hooked to an external crt. I've pulled the hard drive just to help prevent any corruption from the constant hard restarts while troubleshooting. Doing most of this from the bios prompt about the missing drive.