XPS M1730 Black screens

I've had my M1730 for 2 years. I bought it here from a member. The screen will go black sometimes, but the laptop keeps running. It happened when I was playing WOW, full screen and windowed mode. Also happened when I was watching a movie. Also happenes when I boot up the laptop. Today it happened when I was looking at ebay for 8800m GTX Sli (contacting the seller), to replace my current one. So is it a sign that my video card is failing or is it something else? My video card idles around 42C. Any help will be appreciated.

 

If your computer isn't over heating it could be a driver problem. Try updating drivers before you replace it.

 

I think it worked for now. Will do some testing later tonight to see. But my BIOS loads very slow at the last quarter of the loading bar. Is this a sign of something failing or going to fail or whatnot?

 

I believe so. When my inspiron did that one of the RAM sticks needed replacing. Take out one stick of RAM at a time and see if it fixes that problem. Or use memtest86

 

The newest driver seems to work, but when i play games it freezes. For TF2, when it's loading it freezes. I went back to a different driver, 258.96, but now it freezes at game. Like same as before, but after a min it finishes loading. :/

 

I used Windows Memory Diagnostic, I tried to get the Memtest86 on a USB, following a guide I saw on the internet, but it wouldn't work. The diagnostic said that there was nothing wrong with my RAM, so what else could it be. Today I updated my driver to 261.00 from laptopvideo2go. Everything went well. I played TF2 for a few hours. Then tonight, I got on and started to get in a server, was waiting for the round to finish. Then BAM black screen. I shut down my laptop (pressing power button) then I turned it back on. It boots up and shows the Dell logo then BAM black screen. Shut it down again and now it viola here I am. I need my laptop to be in working order, I'm a college student and my finals are next week. Any help will be appreciated.

 

I've ruled out the video card's temp. I just played TF2 in windowed mode, and saw the GPU temp was at about 55-60C. But then TF2 froze when it loading the map, the CPU usage dropped to 4-9% then went back to 49 or w/e percent. Is it possible it's my cpu? or that the Windows Memory Diagnostic is stupid and wrong about my RAM having no problems?

 

your computer has some built in RAM. try removing both sticks of RAM and see if it runs normally then. IDK if any games will be possible tho. You can use Prime95 as a CPU test.
This site has a good graphics card tester.
Video Card Stability Test - Stress Testing & Benchmark the speed of your 3D graphics video card