W230ST NVDIA Card dead?

Hi Everyone, My w230st has been working fine since I've got it. I downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers about a week or so ago. The other day the laptop just shut itself off withing 20 minutes of me gaming. After a few minutes I turned it on and played the same game successfully for 3 hours with no problems. Last night tried to play Dirt 3 and the computer crashed while it was trying to load. I got the blue screen and windows 8 made an attempt to fix repairs automatically with no success. Trying to restore to a previous time was also unsuccessful. I managed to load the laptop in Safe mode. (I'm assuming that safe mode uses integrated graphics) While in safe mode i deleted the Nvidia drivers. After deleting the Nvidia driver was the only time I can boot windows normally. I tried installing the original Nvidia driver that came with the laptop. But the driver program hangs up when installing the driver. I also tried the current driver from Nvidia website, that too, hangs up and crashes the laptop. Will reinstalling windows 8 help my cause or is my nvidia card done?

 

Can you post your full spec cpu, gpu, ram, hdd, ssd and how long youve had it. Also which driver did you have loaded and which was the latest one you loaded.

 

You may need to reinstall the Intel HD graphics driver first, then the NVidia one. The shutdowns and BSODs don't sound like a bad VGA card (rather, a bad storage drive or faulty memory), though the failing driver installs aren't too promising.

 

Does it crash because of overheat, are the fans running on full before blackout? If that's the case then at least the W230ST should be easy to clean and repaste.

 

Sorry for the slow response on this thread. I was being deployed when all this happened. Basically I did a clean install of windows 8. Without loading any additional drivers after the install, the laptop worked great no hickups. I installed all the windows 8 updates. Then I installed the intel video drivers first with no problems. After restart I attempted to load the Nvidia drivers that came with the system. Same thing, same errors, same hangups, and same BSOD.

While i was doing all this I was in contact with the seller. Which they concluded to have me send it back to them. Which I did. So now I'm on a ship deployment with no gaming laptop. Hopefully they can fix it and have steam installed for me and have it set to OFFLINE mode. Thanks for the replies everyone.

 

In the future, install your drivers (starting with the chipset driver, then the Intel HD driver before the dedicated video card driver) before installing Windows updates. I'm glad your supplier is taking care of you, though I sympathize for you being without your lappy.

 

That does sound to me like a dud chip though, unlucky, I hope you get it back soon.

 

Thanks for that information. I hope not to have the same problem again. It does suck without my laptop. I've been gaming with my phone...just not the same.

Thanks everyone for your input. I'll share what my reseller has concluded and what they have done to the laptop once I get it back. They did tell me if it was the nvidia card they would have to replace the whole motherboard.

 

Yeah the GPU is soldered on the board in the smaller machines so it's simpler to replace it at that point.

 

Sorry to drag up this old thread, but what ended up being the root cause of your issue? I'm having a similar problem and I'm hoping there's a solution that doesn't involve a new motherboard...

Edit - looks like his GPU died. Twice. http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/w230ss-motherboard-into-w230st-chassis.767049/