In need of urgent help from Sager Brethren

I have an NP9262/D901c and I think the video card (8800m gtx) is dead... But I'm not sure. I read these forums and posts all over the net that tell stories of people seeing artifacts across their screen and what not. I do not see any of those things. Instead, I experience a frozen computer upon login of any OS I throw at it. What's more, the frozen screen looks like a solid color wallpaper of the respective OS (If I'm using windows then it's light blue, Ubuntu then it's orange). I cannot ctr+alt+del out of this. In fact all the buttons are useless (except power off). I'm pretty sure this is a GPU issue, because I can run both windows (7 and xp) and linux (ubuntu) fine without the driver. I've gone through many archived drivers and even tried OS integrated drivers. None of them worked. The only things I haven't done is reformat my hard drive (but I have deleted my partitions and overwrote them), change its slot location, some video card flashing crap, BIOS reinstating crap, and getting the card baked (not with weed). If possible, could you throw some advice at me please? I will gladly accept any help! Thank you in advance!

 

This means your video card is dying soon you wont even be able to boot without the driver.

 

Seriously serious?? Damn.... Well, thanks for letting me know.
Edit: So a dying GPU could cause my laptop to lets say quit in the middle of something?

 

Pretty much it is just a ticking time bomb at this point. The symptoms you have are pretty much exactly what happened with my wife's laptop as well. I just replaced hers with an AMD card so she should be good to go for as long as the laptop lasts. Unfortunately the older NV cards are all defective and will fail sooner or later. If you can replace it with a newer from the 200 series or AMD card it will be much more likely to last.

 

That's quite an extreme statement. I have also 8800m gtx and it is not defective. The AMD card are not supported in D901C. If you put one in your D901C and it worked cool. I thought it would not work.

 

It's quite known that the 8000M series had a lot of production errors... especially the 8600M GTs dropped like flies. It should also be no problem to switch to an ATI card.

 

So all 8800 cards are broken? I haven't heard of anybody putting a ATI card in D901C.

 

There are so many users with 8800M GTX and 9800M GT cards dying after 12-18 months.

 

That's bad. I read about the 8600 cards failing a lot. I never had problems and there are many users who still use 8800m gtx. Mine is 2 years old.

 

Recently, many M860TU users with 9800M GT reports a failing video card. Mine died after 14 months.

 

Mines more than 2 years old and still running well.I know few others with good 8800M as well.So not all of them are bad!

 

Just to clarify I do not know if there are any supported ATI cards for the 901 my wife's laptop was a different model from a different manufacturer. Generally bios support isn't an issue as ati cards have the vbios on the card.

 

There are some that last just fine but it is more luck if the draw than anything else. There is basically a problem with the under fill and bumps that connect the die to the chip package that causes fractures in the solder bumps. Some last others don't but once you start having symptoms like this guy your card is done for. You can revive the gpu for a short time with a heat gun or some people bake them but it is just a temporary fix.