Laptop screen faded, washed out, ghosting & unresponsive (Acer Aspire 5315-2326)

[i3lueHorneT]

The screen on a laptop I have not used in several weeks is behaving very oddly.

The image is washed out and faded, the laptop is unresponsive for a period, and as a new window pops up a portion of the previous image remains. When at the safe boot selection screen moving the highlighted selection takes a moment for the next selection to light up and the text of what was previously highlighted takes a moment to change to a non-highlighted state.

Is my monitor dying or could something else be the cause?

I was having some trouble with this laptop for awhile and had this written up for it, thought it could be relevant:

Originally Posted by Quoting previous write-up

In the past few months my laptop has slowed down drasticly and I'm not sure why. Some examples:

-alt-tabbing between programs is slow
-changing directories in Windows Explorer is slow
-opening new tabs/closing tabs in both Firefox and Chrome is slow/mouse becomes unresponsive
-programs become unresponsive for a bit, happens often with Firefox and Chrome
-I lose mouse control for a bit

The above examples don't always occur but they do happen frequently enough to be pretty annoying. I run frequent virus scans via avast! and have never had any issues. I also use COMODO Firewall and keep both avast! and COMODO updated. I run Windows Update as new updates are available.

System:

-Acer Aspire 5315-2326 Laptop
-Vista Basic
-Intel Celeron 550 2.0GHz
-1GB DDR2
-2.5 years old
-more than 40% free disk space on both partitions

Questions:

1. I've never run a disk defrag, should I use the Windows one or pick up a 3rd party utility?
2. Is there a utility suite I can run that will check for and fix any issues I might have?
3. Is it possible this is due to a Windows update?
4. A fresh boot reveals a 750MB memory usage (out of 1GB) in the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager, is that not fairly high? I only have an avast!, COMODO, DU Meter, and NetLimiter 2 Pro running.

[.NetRolller 3D]

Sounds like a broken LVDS cable.

Can you take a photo of the problem?