Asus G50V gpu troubles and removal

I'm using an Asus G50V with an Nvidia GeForce 9800M card. I'd been having computer troubles for a couple of days; the screen would flicker and an icon would pop up saying that the display driver had restarted. and twice the screen basically froze into a 0.2fps slideshow.
Earlier tonight after freezing again and restarting, everything was stuck in 800x600 resolution. Uninstalling and reinstalling the driver didn't work, and right now I'm in 1280x720 using what I assume is window's default drivers.
It seems as if my video card doesnt exists; under the Display tab of dxdiag, Name: and Monitor: are blank, and Manufacturer, Chip Type, etc are n/a; in Personalization/Display Settings/Advanced Settings, Adapter type is blank and everything under Adapter Information is unavailable or n/a.
The odd thing is, running Nvidia's auto-driver-find detects the 9800 chip, with the driver download of 306.23

I'm kind of thinking that it's probably a hardware, rather than a software problem. I've looked at some guides for reseating or replacing the card, including this one San-Dex: Network Security: Asus G50 NVIDIA 260M Swap Procedure, but while the card in the image is a rectangle, mine seems to have a tab that extends into the cover that makes it impossible to remove.

I'm wondering if it's even possible to fix this problem, in any way, or resign myself to getting a new computer (a step I was planning to take soon anyways, but not with a half-functional machine until then).

I'd appreciate any advice anyone can give.

 

Here is the http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...8551-asus-g50-notebook-disassembly-guide.html

I'm not sure what you are referring to about the tab, but there is black tape that connects the fan to the fins on the vent. After you have removed the screws, you just peel this tape off carefully (it has to be reused) and the heatsink assembly will come out at an angle.

 

Here are some pictures of my graphics card Graphics Card - Imgur

I've already removed the heatsinks; as you can see the card is not a rectangle and part of it juts beneath the cover.
It doesn't seem possible to remove in any way I can see.

Since the first post I got the card kind of working by reinstalling the driver serveral times and fiddling with graphics settings and power options; it functions for a while, but inevitably blackscreen/bluescreen/freezes after an hour or two, regardless of what I'm doing.
Got a cooling pad today, which seems to help but not solve the problem. While gaming, the GPU temp in SpeedFan never exceeds 70C, but still crashes after about two hours.