I have an old CRT monitor that I just tried connecting to my laptop as an additional display. The display itself works, my windows are replicated there, but anywhere there is text, a white blurry streak starts at that point and continues some two inches to the right. The problem seems the same as the one described in this MajorGeeks thread, but there's no resolution given there either.
I tried restarting the laptop, the white streaks still appear even on the BIOS screen and Windows' bootup sequence. I guess that means it's a hardware level issue, but I'm not sure what kind of issue it could be. I'm ready to dive into the circuitry of it and replace a capacitor or a resistor if someone could give me a good starting point to look for trouble.
I'm probably going to give this away to a local school or something anyway, I just wish to give it in a usable condition since their resources are going to be hugely limited.