M17x R2 Screwing up BAD

Alrighty so... I was playing Diablo 3 last night, and had been playing on the machine pretty much all day yesterday at that, when the power goes out at my friend's place right in the middle of a mob raid. Framerates dip and due to battery mode, I can't play games like this anymore. No big deal with me.

So I shut down the machine for the night, being around midnight, and head off to bed. No visual artifacts on the screen, no reason to suspect any hardware damage. Shuts down as per normal.

When I boot it up the following morning after power is restored, my machine cannot seem to boot with the power cord in unless it's in safemode as I am now. I take the machine apart down to the GPU and remove it to see if there's any damage, none seen, before placing it back in. Well as it appears, either done just then by me or due to the power outage the previous night, the GPU is now artifacting so badly that it looks like the old 256 colors that most Windows 95 PCs had, however inverted...

So... I can't boot into Windows normally now since the machine freezes and gives me an invisible BSOD as per normal as well, I deal with this BS waaay too often to be considered OK. So I'm screwed now officially. I have absolutely no way to pay for another GPU OR a PSU for this laptop and I don't even know if those are the problems!

I've already tried the power purge thing and no dice. Unless someone has a spare GPU they can lend me, I'm boned.

Rest assured that I'll be going back to Toshiba once I get my Pell Grant in. $900 netted me a solid five months of use before the GPU goes on me. >_> Not acceptable. Not unless you all have some miraculous fix for this problem?

 

Sorry for the double post but here's what my desktop looks like just so you get an idea of what I'm seeing. I should look pretty bad... >.>

 

Diablo 3 cost me a GPU in my r2 as well. To keep from re-posting all the stuff about it, check out my post history. I ended up replacing the 4870 with a 580m i bought from a member here for 300 bucks.

 

The way you described the artifacting sounds much like a time when my monitor cable was a little loose. Of course that doesn't explain Windows not booting but I would try reseating the cable first. Artifacting usually doesnt change the entire color of the screen. Also, the aritfacting won't show up in the screenshot, another thing that makes me think this could be the monitor and not the GPU.

Might as well try reseating it to rule out the monitor and make sure its the GPU.

This is more what artifacting would look like: Imageshack - gpu1.jpg

 

I had this exact thing happen when I installed my 580m; the monitor cable wasn't seated exactly right. I was getting the same symptoms as the OP. Re-seating it solved the works.

 

have you tried uninstalling gpu drivers in safe mode? then reinstalling.

 

mmm i had windows badly corrupted once. It happend while playing the witcher 2, power went off and my laptop didn't like it at all. I had similar issue as you are describing, actually thinking it was my hardware the problem. A fresh windows install fixed the issue.

May be worth a try

 

The problem I have is that this is happening every OTHER time the power drops out on me. >.< I've had to reinstall Windows 7 EVERY SINGLE TIME. This is the third time it's happened and I am finding it insanely hard to justify this happening on a constant basis without moving to a more stable machine. If I hadn't already gotten my 7970M in it, I'd have moved onto something else. >_>

 

How about AlienRespawn? that wouldn't take much time and it may be even better due to the fact that it would just rollback meaning no more driver installations.

You can set it up after the OSRI