GE laptop screen cutting off letters

I’m looking for some advice or a second opinion if anyone knows their stuff. I’ve got this General Electric laptop that’s about 5 or 6 years old—never taken it to a repair shop, hasn't even had the thermal paste swapped out once since day one. It seemed fine.

But over the last month, certain parts of letters on the screen have just been... missing. I attached some photos so you can see what I mean. It first jumped out at me on the Google homepage—the very first letter was chopped off, but then the same letter would show up perfectly fine just a bit further down. Now I’m noticing those missing fragments all over different websites.

My other, newer laptop works perfectly fine, so it’s definitely not an issue with the websites themselves.

I already checked the graphics card and the drivers—the computer says everything is running smoothly and is totally up to date.

I’m planning to drop it off at a repair shop soon—maybe it’s just time for that thermal paste replacement—but I’d love to hear what you guys think is actually going on here.

Could it be the screen?😲

Hopefully, the photos make the problem clear enough.
>
>

The photos aren't super clear, but look where the search bar is in the first shot—the "T" in "Search" is missing its top vertical part entirely. And on Google, you can see two "j"s written differently—the first one is cut off.

The photos look flawless. That tells me we aren't looking at a software glitch—this is definitely a hardware issue. Look, if you aren't comfortable tearing down a laptop yourself, just take it to a repair shop. Have them open it up, clean out the dust, and swap out the thermal paste on the GPU. If that doesn't fix it—and honestly, I'm leaning toward it being a bigger problem—then your graphics card is likely shot. People out there do reballing to fix loose solder joints on the chip, but you need a professional heat gun setup for that. If things are still broken after a deep clean, the GPU is probably toast. Also, try browsing different sites—I get this sometimes too because some websites are just coded poorly. But if it's getting cut off everywhere, then yeah, that graphics card is dying, and in a laptop? There's basically no saving it.

Yeah, I get that sometimes things just get cut off too...
But honestly, I can't blame Windows—that's never happened to me.

It’s definitely not right that the letters are cutting off—and it's not a browser issue since everything looks fine on my other laptop. I'll drop it off at the repair shop and see what's actually going on.

I downloaded Speedtech and it's showing some crazy high temps, so yeah, it's probably time for a thermal paste refresh anyway.