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Again, I Come To The Tech Board For Help

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SolemnMonk:
Initial setup:
Type: Laptop
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium x64
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.60GHz
RAM: 4 GB (2x 2GB)
HDD: 320GB (1x 320GB)
Video Card: nVidia GeForce 8600M GTS 256MB

Current setup:
Same except I'm now running Windows 7 Professional x64

     I think my graphics card died. I leave my laptop on constantly in order to seed (and occasionally leech ;-P) and, as usual, left it on overnight. I woke up and noticed that the colors were all wrong. Roughly 20% of the pixels (in random spots) were wrong colors (generally bright green and purple) and the display wouldn't refresh properly to anything that occurred. I rebooted, chalking it up to not having given it a proper shutdown in over a week (sleep mode and hibernation FTW). It rebooted fine, but began making the same errors again within a minute or so. Reboot again. The login screen never displayed and the laptop rebooted. I booted into safe mode with networking and updated my driver to the newest version. I rebooted and was greeted with a blue screen of death (Video card timeout error).

     I rolled back the driver to the previous version and got the same result. I moved it back to the factory installed driver. It booted, gave me the original graphics errors, then died. I finally changed the driver to the Standard VGA Adapter that comes with Windows. Now I have basic video but nothing fancy (I'm using the laptop now and it's registering 14MB of VRAM). I tried several time over the couple of weeks after the initial episode to update the driver but to no avail. I finally upgraded to 7, mostly in the hope of it being a corrupted driver. I upgraded but the same problems continued after trying to upgrade with 7.

     Anyway, I believe with a community as large as this one, someone should be able to shed some light on this situation or come up with a solution. I'm ready to play games and 720p/1080p video again :'( Any help would be greatly appreciated guys ^_^

P.S. - The updates were acquired through HP's site, nVidia's site, and Windows Update, each being downloaded multiple times, so I honestly doubt I was using corrupted downloads.

fohfoh:
Im 90% sure your vid card is fubared. Especially since it's an NVidia 8000 series.

SolemnMonk:
What does the series have to do with it?

Edit: I'm assuming from your comment it's not the best series, but was it notoriously bad?

fohfoh:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2203

In short, the 8400M and the 8600M were in the shit for notoriously bad failure rates that basically melted down the mobo. Dell and HP were affected the most. 

SolemnMonk:
Well damn, lol. That one's a little hard to ignore. Any ideas before I burn a ton of money on a new motherboard/laptop?

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