Prevent me from losing more hair (aka Why does my Panasonic PT-AX100 often glitch)

[ventolin]

I have troubleshooted my broken heart out on this issue over the past three months and now still without a solution I come in hope that someone can lend some advice...

I bought a PT-AX100 in the sales last year, just as the PT-AX200 was about to enter the scene. Naively, perhaps, I bought it from Pixmania, but it's covered by a 1 year guarantee even though it's refurbished, so if all else fails I can send it back to them.

The projector runs great with my Xbox 360 at 720p, a crystal clear signal on the regular Microsoft vga cable.

The projector ran "okay" for a while at 1024x720 from my Acer laptop on a 2m vga cable, however straight away I noticed some artifacts/blurring on the top 5% of the screen. To escape buyer's remorse I tried not let that dissuade my affections for the new projector. The thing is, it runs fine on my flatmates Asus laptop, so I assume(d) it's a problem with my laptop.

After a month or two the image from my laptop disentegrated and would glitch out for a split moment every 60 seconds with a scrambled image across the screen. Dropping the resolution to 800x600 has now fixed this, however this inherently limits what I'm able to do with a HD projector and laptop. Please note that this same laptop works fine on my Dell 22" monitor at all of the supported resolutions. Strange that with the same vga cable the problem would just be with the projector, no?

A couple of months ago I ended up buying a decent quality 5m vga cable to hook up to the projector so that I could put the noisy 360 in a separate room behind closed doors. Picture quality on this cable is still great from 360 and my mate's laptop, however now my Acer can't display anything above 800x600 on it.

Struth!

One would immediately think that this is a problem with signal loss, and to use a shorter cable. However:

1. Why would other devices (360, mate's laptop) be able to work fine on the same cables, and;
2. Why is my laptop able to get a clear signal to an LCD monitor but not to the projector.

My final troubleshoot would be to get a short, decent quality vga cable to run from the laptop to the projector, however I thought before I spend anymore money someone might have seen this behaviour before.

I should also mention that updating display drivers on the laptop has no effect and that it's running a nVidia Geforce 7600.

Any ideas guys?