M1210 possible GPU failure

I purchased my M1210 back in June of 2007, it replaced a 700m as my main laptop. Its been a great laptop, up until a couple nights ago.. I had downloaded the Warhammer online open beta earlier in the day, that night when I logged in to play it took about 30 seconds before blue vertical lines appeared on the screen and then I received a BSOD error and the laptop shut off. I immediately tried to turn the laptop back on, but while the power lights would turn on I couldn't get anything on the screen. After trying various things the screen finally came back on and it booted into Windows, unfortunately that only lasted for a couple minutes before I received the same BSOD error and the computer shut down again. Since then I haven't been able to get anything on the laptop screen.

What I have been able to do is display some things via the VGA out port, I used the dell diagnostic tools and while testing the graphics card I received repeated memory errors.
While trying to boot into windows I received the same BSOD error " nvlddmkm.sys" which is a nvidia driver. Since then I uninstalled the nvidia drivers in safe mode and was able to boot into windows using the generic VGA driver (though only through the VGA out port).
From what I've read I believe the GPU has failed, but I wanted to get a little more input before forking out money for a new motherboard or have to pay some repair place just to diagnose the problem.
So if anyone has any ideas on what else it might be, maybe something obvious I've overlooked, I would greatly appreciate it.

Here are my basic system specs:


OS: Windows vista home edition
CPU: T7200
GPU: Geforce go7400
Ram: 3GB

 

Aren't the M1210 laptops the ones that I heard about that play HL2 at 2fps because the GPU is always overheating? If that is the case with your laptop, and reading the symptoms that you stated, then most likely your GPU is dead, probably because of the NVIDIA solder-bump fiasco.

-J.B.

 

I believe the GPU has been overheating for a while now, when I would play World of Warcraft (not exactly the most demanding game graphically) it would start out great with a steady 40-60FPS, but after playing for a while it would run slower and slower until it was steadily dipping into the 15-20fps range.
I purchased a Antec Laptop cooler about a month ago and since I started using that my frame rate seemed to stabilize.. However at the same time I purchased the cooler I also upgraded my ram from 1.5GB to 3GB so that may have accounted somewhat for the performance increase as well.
After I received the cooler I did download a temperature monitoring program and my GPU temp would max out at around 80C while playing 3d games with the cooler.


I suppose it is somewhat ironic that less than a month after I purchased the laptop cooler and started monitoring the temperature my GPU has apparently failed.

 

Just a suggestion that if you have an xps 1210 and you are experiencing problems with the gpu, system overheating, hardware failure, not booting etc., then post on the direct2dell blog. They are extending the warranty for numerous laptops with nvidia cards due to a high failure rate. Unfortunately, after hours on the phone, they told me that the xps 1210 is not included. I believe it is the exact same issue that other dell laptop users are experiencing and they need to be made aware that the xps 1210 should be included as well. If they get enough complaints, perhaps it will be extended to the 1210.

 

Refer to this post for instructions on how to get Dell to fix your M1210's broken GPU:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4611553#post4611553