Occasional horizontal split screen on Acer 7520 laptop

about five days ago my mom's laptop (acer aspire 7520) suddenly displayed a horizontally split screen, as follow up it also crashed and then failed to boot etc. causing me to spend the last two days getting it back to work.

the split screen is seperated by a thin white line across the monitor and both halfs display the same, including mouse movements. the whole desktop is visible on both halfs each and functions properly except being a bit blurry. also, the screens are both misplaced on the monitor, meaning they're left aligned.

the split screen appears at random, mostly already on the first screen after turning the laptop on, when MS-DOS is loading(?). while the laptop had no OS (I mean software..) on it the split screen appeared more frequently and a friend of mine suspects a hardware failure. oddly enough, the split screen did not occur for a while after the reinstallment of win7 x32 home premium.

I'm really puzzled about what is causing this problem.

about the laptop:

acer aspire 7520 (about 4 years old)
AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL-60 (3.2 GHz)
3 GB DDR2 RAM
" Standard VGA-Grafikkarte" (Ati X1250 ? )
->NVIDIA GeForce 8400M G




I'm new to this so please bear with my lack of knowledge/ comprehension. :blush:

any help appreciated! :eek:
 
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