Screen Problem, Help!!

[justmetoday2]

I have a Gateway Windows XP Laptop.

The first time I had this problem was a few months ago. I then had it happened the day before yesterday and yesterday.

THE PROBLEM:

My screen suddenly becomes a different color (the entire screen and the mouse disappears). The first time, it became a striped screen of thick brownish pink and white lines. It was the same color of the chess board of an online chess game I was playing.

The second time, I had my MP3 sound recorder on (a blueish screen with black on it) and then my screen became that blueish color with a hint of black. It was not striped like the first time.

Yesterday it happened again, it was thick stripes of light pink and white (the color of my wallpaper, but I was online).

The mouse disappears and I have to shut it down manually (since I can't click on 'start' because it's gone). When I restart it, everything seems fine.

I've run spysweeper and anti-virus and haven't found anything suspicious.

A friend of mine who has an XP said she had the same problem and it would happen now and again (her colors were different though).

Is it just a glitch?

I'm very unsure what to do and I just want help...please?

[osprey4]

The procedure for diagnosing a laptop panel problem is to connect an external monitor. If the problem occurs on the external monitor, then you have a video adapter problem. If not, then it's a panel problem. You might want to try disconnecting and reconnecting the video cable from the panel to your graphics adapter.

[#43 fan]

It's probably one of two things: a bad monitor or a bad GPU.
Possibly the GPU is overheating and is corrupting the video data.