C90S Graphic / Dead Problem

I've had my C90s since Aug 2007, and it's been great.
Today as I was doing daily tasks like playing a video game in windowed mode, the screen suddenly tears (graphically). There's noticeable shear and then the laptop freezes and locks up. I manually restart via the power button, and upon restart, the screen has tons of artifacts (I think), and noticeable shear/tearing of the image. It tries to reboot, but won't. I select "start windows normally" and it loads the Logo but then it BSODs.

At first this reminded me of an overheated graphics card, but the last time that happened on a desktop, I just waited for it to cool off and all was fine. This was not so for a while.

update:I just restarted again and all I see now is bright vertical lines in no discrete pattern. It does not even show the ASUS logo now. Ok I just restarted again and everything looks normal.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what happened?

I took a picture with my camera earlier, sorry I didn't get a chance to resize them. Yes, I'm in the picture too thanks to the reflection.

This is the screen that asks you to boot normally or in safe mode:
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/6504/imgp1263.jpg

This is the windows loading logo screen (notice the image tearing on the left)
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/6379/imgp1264q.jpg

This has never happened before, any ideas for future prevention would be appreciated.

E6600
2gB DDR2 667
120gB WD1200BEVS
BIOS 1002
512MB 8600M GT <--- =(

Speedfan says:
GPU 79C
HD0 45C
Core0 57C
Core1 55C
Core 79C
Temp1 60C

(After it managed to boot up on its own)

 

Well, I thought everything was ok, and I started up the game again (FFXI) which is by no means a graphically demanding game for today.

The graphics immediately crapped out and I managed to take a picture of the screen. (Sorry for uncompressed images again)
Primary Screen
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/1313/imgp1267.jpg
Secondary monitor
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/8140/imgp1268.jpg
You can kind of still make out the temps in the bottom left from Speedfan =/

 

nvidia strikes again, probably you have just added to the statistic for the defective 8000 series cards.

 

Dangit, I was hoping you would not say that.

What are my options now?
Buy a new defective 8 series to fit in for ~$200?

 

Buy a 9600M GT or 9650M GT from zepto $300 or $220 usd. See nightwalker 9600M GT upgrade he used a card bought from zepto which used samsung memory modules. The 9650M GT they sell I learnt today uses same memory chips so very likely to work fine

 

You have to pretty much, some advanced users have used other cards but it may require modding or advanced methods to install it and get it working.