Video card?? What THE is going on?

I have an hp dv2600 with an 8400m GS with 64mb of memory.

Please bear with me.... any help would really really be appreciated:

Just the other day, I was watching a movie on my external display and I got a couple errors from Windows, the yellow exclamation point ones in the systemtray that said there was a hardware fault of sorts. Mediaplayer would close and I would fire it off again, figuring there was nothing wrong. I did this two times, after the second fail, windows shutdown. Suddenly, I had no display! There was nothing being shown, not the HP screen in the bios, not windows, nothing. I tried it on another screen, no go. Obviously I tried it on the laptops screen, nothing also.

From there.... I really didn't know what to do. I started turning it on and off... over and over and over and over again..... eventually, my screen was back! Evidently, the drivers were gone or something.... so I installed the latest drivers from nvidia.... everything was going peachy. The next day, the same thing happened.... screen disappeared. So I started doing my on/off thing for 30 minutes or so... initially I thought it was the on/off cycling, but it turns out if I let it boot into windows for a minute or two, a few times, then it works. I think it disables the driver or something. So this has happened about 3-4 times, each time I get it back on. I have also realized that now, sometimes I get these purple lines and such on my screen, just before the video card goes south and dies.

WAT THE is going on? Is it a hardware issue? I mean, if it was a hardware issue, shouldn't the video card not come back to life? For instance, I have the nvidia drivers installed now, 178.18 (they seem to give me the most "life" while all other versions only give me abt an hour or so), and it seems to be working fine. Is it software?

I can't boot into Vista anymore.... i think my install is done. I am trying to transfer everything to an external HD in safe mode.... but the bloody thing has issues.... I don't know. it starts off at 60mb/sec, a while later, it's either transferring at 6mb/sec, or it freezes..... go figure.

ANY... input would be helpful... and I do mean any! I have never witnessed anything like this. Usually, when it's a hardware issue, that's it... it's done. No matter what you do..... but like.... this I don't know man....

 

Another 8 series death?

 

i had the same problem with my 8400. your card is dead. i had a yellow exclamation point i couldn't click on or get any info about. then my screen started going black. I could hear vista boot but the screen was entirely black. then i started getting artifacts.

heres the thread i started about it. its from start to finish. hp is going to try and charge you 400 if your out of warranty, don't take that bs the cards are defective. read my thread i have links to some stuff showing this i sent them to hp and got it fixed for free. your gonna need a case manager we tried telling about the defect to the techs and they had no idea what we were talking about, once we told the case manager about the defect he said "i know" and sent us a box. if they tell you you cant have a case manager because your out of warrenty, just call back later and get a different rep or try and get a supervisor.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=320982