That kind of looks like how a machine would look if the RAM is loose in the socket or otherwise have a bad contact. And since you mention that it’s random and sometimes there are no vertical lines, that’d be my guess rather than anything to do with graphical software. Is the RAM on your machine soldered on or is it detachable? If it’s the latter, I recommend taking the RAM out and reseating it to see if things improve (try this a couple of times, just to be sure the RAM is properly seated). If the RAM is soldered on then it might have something to do with out of memory. Does the system slow down a couple of seconds before freezing entirely? If it does then it’s likely it’s a OOM thing.

Oh, and for good measure, can you get to the tty (ctrl + alt + f2) when the system freezes? If you can then it’s probably a graphical thing and you can try restarting those processes. If the system is in a complete freeze then I’d say that’s another point for the OOM hypothesis.

me if i was Tails, or “The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity against surveillance, which connects to the Internet exclusively through the anonymity network Tor and is designed to be booted as a live DVD or live USB and never writes to the hard drive or SSD, leaving no digital footprint on the machine unless explicitly told to do so.

Thanks for the clear and concise answer, my man. Cheers!

I also thought that was the issue at first. I’ve tried reconnecting and putting more slack/less slack but the symptoms stay the same. Plus, if it was worn out from open/closing the screen, I think it’d affect the backlight as well as the display when I wiggle the screen back and forth. But they’re both is stable from what I see.

I’m confident it’s that capacitor since I can see the pads aren’t rounded but jagged (there are rounded ones on the board, and I know those are supposed to be empty). That would suggest that the capacitor was torn off by the plastic of bevel of the display assembly being pushed in too far. I can also see that there’s a hole in the protective tape covering board, right where the capacitor should be. It’s a bit awkward to describe but yeah. Plus, the previous owner also described scratching that bevel and symptoms showing up after they did it too often. So all in all, I’m pretty sure it’s the cap. Still, thank you for the answer!

There are numerous ways to deal with it, depending on the specific application and use-case. For some, there’s an open-source alternative that, while not 100% similar in every aspect imaginable, does offer basically the same functionality (LibreOffice for MS Office Suite, Thunderbird for various email clients, Firefox or just Chromium for Google Chrome). For others, you can use an emulator (WINE, for example). For games specifically, Steam offers an emulator that works for most games (Proton); in fact, all the games I’ve tried worked. Then, there’s the very last option, which is using a virtual Windows machine within Linux. I mention it last because I honestly haven’t found many cases where I absolutely needed to do this, and because the set-up is rather “involved”, shall we say. But if you’re using Adobe Suite stuff then, yeah, you basically got no choice there.

Would you mind listing some of the essential programs that you use so we can get a better idea what your workflow is?