Gateway P-6860FX boots to black screen

Apologies in advance for the long post, but I'm getting desparate...

What started this: I was playing World Of Warcraft when the computer froze and went to a pink screen. Was a bit random, I wasn't raiding or anything just questing. So I manually restarted the computer, and it would only boot to a black screen with a cursor on it. I've had this happen before, so I rebooted in to Safe Mode, uninstalled the driver and went to reinstall it. That's when the fun started...

I have a Gateway P-6860FX laptop with an Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTS card running on Windows Vista 64bit. Whenever I install ANY Nvidia drivers, run the installation and reboot the computer, it will show the bar indicating that it's opening Windows but will only show a perfectly blank black screen after that. The only way I can get access to the desktop is to manually power the machine off and restart it in Safe Mode. I tried the drivers listed below, and none of them work.

I have tried installing the following drivers: 270.51, 267.76, 267.24, 266.58, 260.99 and 179.48. I have also contacted Gateway for their driver, the 7.15.11.6746 version, that didn't work either.

What I've done so far (in order):
-Installed each of the drivers (this step was done on EACH driver separately) and restarted the machine, got the black screen. Powered off the machine and restarted in safe mode, uninstalled the driver and deleted it off of the computer. Installed the Standard VGA graphics driver and restarted in to Standard mode to try the next driver.

-I tried using System Repair, it didn't find anything.

-I decided to restore the computer back to factory settings to see if there were perhaps a software conflict or something along those lines. I did the restore and installed all of the Windows updates except the graphics card update. After all of those updates were applied, I restarted in to Standard with the Standard VGA graphics and it worked fine. I installed the recommended driver for the graphics card through Windows, and it rebooted to the black screen again.

-After running in to that again, I decided to try all of the drivers (again) on the fresh install of Vista. Again, the same black screen. Except this time it wouldn't reinstall the VGA graphics driver so I had to run a system restore to a point that I created after the updates but before installing the Nvidia drivers.

-After trying the Nvidia drivers, I contacted Gateway for their driver for the specific computer, specific card that I have. I have a link I can provide to that if it's needed. That STILL booted to the same black screen. So, I reverted back to the system restore that I know works.

At this point, I have a laptop that "works" but I can't play any kind of games on it at all, which is all I used it for. Please help, I'm willing to try anything before attempting to buy a new video card. If that's the conclusion that is reached, does anyone know of one that would work in my laptop? Thank you in advance, and sorry for the book of a post!

 

Sounds like the GPU is gone. The fact you had the pink screen mid gaming is a good indicator. You could try the reflow but I am not sure that is the only issue you have.

Unfortunately these laptops have a soldered in GPU, there is no changing the video card. Again a reflow of the solder MAY temporarily fix the system but most who do this find it eventually fails again.

One possability is to try to reset cmos. The card could just essentially be stuck. This can be done by removeing all power and cmos battery then hold the power button for 30 seconds. Another wat is to get the DST table to fail by powering up and then immediately shut down with the power button. when you boot alot if not all the drivers may have to reinstall or intialize. Again this might fix it or could brick it as if the card is reset and 3d won't work your present config that does boot could be in jeopardy.

 

Have you tried hooking up an external monitor to the laptop and seeing if it can run that way?