[SOLVED] Alienware 17 R4 display vertical lines

[tjbumbico]

Hello people.

I have an Alienware 17 R4 that seems to have a strange issue. I did not turn the system on for a few months while working on my house and I went to power it on BOOM vertical lines in the display. Some times the lines would move a little, or come in and out. Sometimes there were 2, other times there were more. The system was stored away and not moved/damaged. So I started troubleshooting.

System: Alienware 17 R4
-Intel core i7-7820HK 2.90Ghz
-32Gb G. Skill Ripjaws 2400mhz
-Intel HD Graphic 630
-GTX 1080
-HGST 1TB SATA
-ScanDisk 128gb NVMe SSD
-Western Digital Black NVMe SSD
-UHD display

I restarted, updated drivers (official Nvidia driver), ran antivirus and crap just in case, then went into more in depth TS.

Tried HDMI cable to see if problem followed on another monitor IT DID NOT... okay probably not GPU, Restarted checked to see if lines showed in BIOS, they do. Tried flexing the screen to see if I could make more lines or make current ones do anything - nothing.
Took apart machine, reseated display cable, no luck. Bought a new display cable, installed it and THE LINES WENT AWAY!!

Got the computer back up and going and updated some things from the DELL site and before they installed the lines came back.

NOTE: The lines are colored - one is pink, other is green, another is blue now. The blue one flickers sometimes.

Please help! thank you in advance.

First Pic no lines after "fixing the prob"

http://imgur.com/gallery/RRuRMRD

Second Pic LINES!!!!! ARRRGHHH

http://imgur.com/gallery/b8DieOj

 

[tjbumbico]

Ran the built in test for the screen and the lines persisted. I'm just confused why the lines were gone at one point and back again.

 

[tjbumbico]

Update: Turned computer on today for the first time since I last posted. No line in the display. Then after a program loaded on startup the line returned... in a different spot. I figured I would uninstall the suspected program and see. I uninstalled, restarted and the line moved again.

could this be a software issue?

 

[tjbumbico]

The lines went away like a week after this thread and they never came back. Weird.