serious notebook display issue!

[cinohpa]

So I was working on my notebook today when the display went blurry, rainbowy and then just froze in less than a second.

I have my machine hooked up to an external monitor and it happened on both the external monitor and the notebook monitor.

I restarted and I could see the back light was on, but no image came up.

I turned off, unplugged monitor and restarted. Still no image. Each time I know it's turning on normally because I hear the normal bios noise. Eventually I even get it to log into windows by sounds. But that was only once. Subsequently it didn't get to the windows login screen and it even restarted sometimes by itself.

There was a beeping noise once.

I booted the hd with an external enclosure just to get some files off and I didn't have any problem.

I'm hoping it's just something loose somewhere. I tried reseating the ram and using a spare old ram stick to see if the ram I had in was ok. Reseating the ram didn't fix anything.

What's next? Should I reseat the CPU? could it just be a loose cable to the screen?

Thanks.