Think my 9800M GT is dead, looking to upgrade

I bought my Sager NP8660 a month or two after they first came out and have been using it steadily since. A few days ago I happened to be playing a game and it began acting up. The game would completely freeze, go back to normal after a few minutes. It did this a few times and then I ended up getting that blue screen memory dump. Upon rebooting the screen began acting weird. A bunch of ~ 4x4 pixel boxes were all about the screen. Upon another reboot the screen became completely "dark-greenish" with a few vertical and horizontal lines. The computer would seemingly boot up fine as I could hear the win7 welcome sound. Thinking it may have been a wildly corrupt driver issue (didn't make sense though as I hadn't changed drivers for ~3 months) I took the HDD out and hooked it up to my desktop so I could retrieve needed data from it and format it. I put the hdd back into the laptop ready to install win7 but the screen issue remained the same. I can only assume it is a dead GPU.

My questions:
1.) Is my video card certainly dead?
2.) Where can I buy a new video card? (I live in the US and am capable of the replacement.)
3.) I'm not looking to spend a ton of money, the 9800M GT did all that I needed but I was searching the forums and it looks like the 260M GTX might be the hot ticket for a relatively affordable price?

Basically, what's going to be the cheapest route? Thanks guys!

 

Here's the 9800M GT on ebay but it's not cheap at $600.

NVIDIA 9800M GT MXM 2.1 TYPE III on eBay.ca (item 110489914364 end time 03-Jul-10 17:13:31 EDT)

Or the 260M GTX that is $475 from the same seller upgradeyourlaptop but I'm not sure where you could get it cheaper, and the bios may not recognize it. I believe there are people on here that have tried this card, and could help you in this regard.

NVIDIA GTX 260M - MXM 2.1 TYPE III on eBay.ca (item 110526662833 end time 29-Jun-10 13:11:15 EDT)

 

At those prices, i'd consider buying a new unit that will be quite alot faster. Bestbuy has some good deals on watered down asus machines, my GF has a g51 that was 1k and is damn fast.

 

Have you tried the baking it in the oven trick found here? That would be the cheapest route until you are ready to buy a new computer.

 

No, I'd like to try everything possible before attempting that. I had never realized how it expensive it was to buy a new video card, but considering the amount of laptops that can actually accept a swap out I guess it makes sense. It's surprising that the popular resellers like xoticpc and powernotebooks don't offer them for reasonable prices. Do these things EVER come down to non mind-blowing prices?

 

You should check around here for them coming up for sale - don't pay an absurd amount for something like on ebay.

 

Youll have a hard time finding any laptop gpu at lower prices..
Id also recommend trying to bake it, since it worked for me and since youve got nothing to loose if you know its only the gpu..
If that doesnt work it just might be more reasonable to purchase a new laptop than bother with buying a new gpu.

 

Will my laptop run a Quadro FX3700M? Thanks