Today my laptop locked up early in a game of company of heroes. I don’t think it was very hot because I hadn’t been using it long, but the 8800M chip in it has a history of heat issues. After rebooting I saw it post okay, but after going to the windows login screen the video blacked out. Multiple reboots had the same thing happen most of the time, but a couple times there was an obvious video glitch on screen (wierd repeating patterns of pixels). I tried to go to safe mode, which worked, and remove/reinstall the driver and had a variety of problems including the driver installer saying there was no hardware that supported it. Eventually I was able to switch the driver to the basic VGA, then run windows update and get an nvidia driver from there. It seemed to work okay for a while and then without warning I was back to no video.
It’s currently reinstalling win vista 64, which it came with. The installer app is displaying just fine, for what it’s worth.
I’m assuming though, that I’m screwed, and the video chip on this laptop is pooched. Would anyone have any other suggestions?
edit Oh, and the laptop is a Gateway FX-something. I don’t have it in front of me right this second.