For years now, I've had my laptop set up to display exclusively on my external monitor and everything worked great. Then, all of a sudden my external monitor started to flicker, going completely black, then back on, then black, then on, and finally it "died" completely. The power was still on, but the monitor wouldn't display anything. But when I unplugged the SVGA cable, the monitor started displaying the "Cable Unplugged" message. I have since discovered that I can get the external monitor to display but only if I have my laptop display duplicated. If I try to display solely on the external monitor or extend the display to the external monitor, it won't display anything. The funny thing is that NOTHING changed, hardware or software. It simply started flickering and then the above happened. What component does it sound like is going bad? I'm going to borrow a friend's cable and laptop and do some testing, but I just wanted some ideas first.

As much as I hate to encourage #techsupport...

In my experience, GPUs tend to crash the system outright or garble display when they start to die. Cycling on and off (and then crapping out) has been my monitors dying (easy to tell in my case since I use two). The first I had fixed under warranty.

The second time (same model, identical symptoms, out of warranty), a quick google of symptoms led me to suspect bad capacitors -- the cycling, along with the symptoms getting worse and worse. Others often experienced only certain display modes would fail at first -- you could try using the external monitor in non-clone mode, taking care to duplicate the resolution, depth, refresh rate, etc, as best you can to what's used in clone mode. I suspect this only delays the inevitable though. Mine failed completely in all modes I tried.

Opening it up (warranty-voiding!), 5-6 capacitors on one of the circuit boards looked like they were bulging a little (comparing to various internet images -- a sign of bad capacitors). I ebayed a refurbished replacement of that board (lacking the tools or skills to solder in replacements myself) for $30 which fixed the problem completely. They were working fine when I recently replaced them.

Well actually, now that you mention it, for the past few months my display has gotten progressively more garbled and my system has completely locked up on several occasions. It almost always happens when I'm playing an intensive 3D game. Starting a few months ago, I would notice that some of the 3D polygonal surfaces would not display textures property - they would just be a bunch of randomly colored dots. For the past several times I've tried to play Call of Duty nearly the entire world/map gets "blanked out" so that I'm just a character running around in a colorless void (the game is still playing through). My computer also completely freezes (cannot CTRL-ALT-DEL) about 50% of the time when I play CoD and it's gotten worse. Even when I'm not playing a 3D game and am just browsing the internet, working on a Word doc, etc., I've started to notice these thin streaks of random color that show up on my display and come and go.

Do these symptoms sound more like a video card going bad? The thing is, I've only noticed this happening on my external monitor. It may also be happening on my laptop monitor but I just never use it so I don't know.

I've had my monitor do a similar thing. It would turn off and then turn back on periodically, but progressively got worse the longer the monitor was on.

Turned out the DVI cable wasn't high enough grade, so when the end of the cable got too hot, the connection would die out until it cooled off. In the end I downgraded to VGA (almost burned my finger touching the end of the DVI cable).

When I had a video card go out, I can't really say what was going on. I was in Japan and doing remote desktop for a couple months. Then all of the sudden I couldn't connect. I guess the computer crashed and wouldn't turn back on until I replaced the card.

And when your laptop bulges up off the table, it is because your battery expanded and the laptop is no longer portable (damn MBP).