Dell Inspiron display acting crazy. Is this my computers's death rattle?

[Comrade Potato]

I have a dell inspiron 1545 running windows 7 64-bit that I fear may be dying. It was running sweet as a peach tonight when suddenly the screen starting flickering red horizontal lines, with no other display on show. I rebooted and it started loading windows, with the animated windows logo, then I hear the sound for that it plays for the login screen, but all I get is the red lines flickering at me again. Booted into safe mode, checked devices, everything seemed fine, so I did a system restore. Same problem again. I then resorted to plugging it into my dell monitor in the vain hope of maybe using that as a screen. Booted up again, I suddenly get the windows login screen, but on the laptop. I promptly unplug the vga cable only for the screen to go off and start flickering at me again. Plugged the vga back in, laptop display comes on but I get nothing on my external monitor, it just seems to be going from powered on, to sleep mode, to powered on again. Weird, huh? At the moment it's running on clone display mode, with the monitor as the main, and the laptop screen as the secondary, but i'm too scared to touch these settings incase it doesn't work and i can't get it back again. It's running on the Intel chipset and I've tried reinstalled the drivers, but to no avail. Just to throw something else in the mix, the computer seems to be responding quite slowly. As I type it takes about a half second to actually appear on screen. Hope that's enough information for a diagnosis, if not I can add more as and when it's needed. Thanks in advance!

[Panama Red]

Reboot and tap the F12 key on startup to get the Boot Options screen. Select Diagnostics and let it run a full diagnostics scan. Write down any error codes that are indicated and use them to contact Dell support. That's a newer model Dell and I'm assuming it's still under warranty. I prefer to use the Dell Chat when contacting their support group - less wait and more easily understood.

[Comrade Potato]

Unfortunately, my warranty ran out about a month ago, good timing eh? I did as you suggested and ran the diagnostic boot mode, but it wouldn't even get to the selection menu. It beeped at me a few times, flashed a few colours at me, then froze on a white screen. Not sure if it was some kind of beep code but while it was stuck on this white screen it's beeps had a pattern of 3 beeps - 3 beeps - 3 beeps then a pause.

This isn't looking very good is it?

[Panama Red]

You can also use the led's for the caps lock, etc as a diagnostic tool. See if this gives you any indication of the problem:

http://support.dell.com/support/topi...B0B&l=en&s=dhs

[Comrade Potato]

No LEDs on my particular laptop I'm afraid. I forgot to mention, however, that when the screen first when off, Windows was waiting to restart after an update, but unfortunately I couldn't shut it down the normal way and had to turn it off by holding down the power button. Not sure how important this is but there it is anyway.