I'm gonna need an external monitor

[Billy F 1988]

...'cause the laptop monitor is a piece of horse shit on a platter with a dash of...shit. What's happened is that the regulator or whatever that is has gone haywire causing numerous vertical lines to appear. And the lines i see on my monitor now are getting grittier which makes this touch screen monitor pretty much useless. So, I'm off hunting for an HDMI external monitor. Essentially, my Dell laptop will end up a desktop since the laptop monitor is shit. I can see it on the green part of this page for example. You can't see them unless I take a snapshot of the lines. Everything else works fine. It's more of a monitor hardware defect rather than a graphic defect, which is what I first though, because had it been a graphic defect, I wouldn't be using my Dell laptop, and I've had this thing for a year and the screen is already going to shit! Yeah, thank you Dell for this wonderful Inspiron laptop with a now piece-of-horse-fluff-and-sewage touch screen with all these stupid lines!

[Roadsguy]

You don't need to get an HDMI monitor. DVI works fine, with an adapter cable. You only really need HDMI if the monitor has built-in speakers.

[Billy F 1988]

I'm not concerned about the audio since I get it from my external Sound Blaster X-Fi Go Pro USB sound card. I just want to get an HDMI type of screen where I can switch from the laptop screen to the external monitor. I'm not really fond of spending all the extra money to get a HDMI-to-DVI converter. I have the cable itself. I just like to get the monitor is all. Whether the monitor has speakers or not is not what my main focus of getting an external monitor is about. There's some sort of inverter or relay circuit board inside the laptop screen that puts out the LCD input, and a lot of the pixels have become garbled with the "rule of thirds" type of situation. By getting an external monitor with an HDMI out port, my laptop will act as the "tower" like an actual desktop computer. By switching monitor sources from the laptop to the external monitor, it will solve the yucky lines issue a lot better than delving over $500 to ship the whole laptop out to an authorized Dell repair center to fix the inverter or circuit board of the touch screen monitor.

[Scott5114]

You can probably find a local computer repair place that will fix it for quicker and cheaper than Dell would. I would at least see about getting an estimate before buying a monitor; it may be more cost-effective to just repair the laptop, depending on what the exact issue is, how the laptop is designed (and thus how much labor it will take to dismantle), and how high-end of a monitor you're looking at (granted you could probably find a low-res used CRT for less than $20 if you were really wanting to keep the cost down).

[DaBigE]

Do you have a relatively new TV? If so, just hook your laptop up to that. Most of them have multiple HDMI inputs on them. I bought a smaller LED TV (~22-in) for my bedroom that doubles as an external monitor--all I have to do is change the input on the TV.