Help needed on TRAP C0000005 Exception

Hi folks. I'm in real trouble here and I cant seem to find the solution. Yes I googled for it and still nothing. (what are the odds to that?!

I own a Toshiba Satellite M30. Its a fairly old piece of hardware but still very usable (used to be a mean machine once). Or at least it was until a recent major problem.

Its a first generation centrino platform:
Pentium M 1.6MHz 2MB cache
1GB RAM
40GB HDD
Nvidia FX5200 64MB graphics card
etc...

It has been the only computer I've used for almost five years now, so one can tell that its not a joke-laptop one can buy these days.

I'll describe in detail what happend:
I left the laptop on overnight, as I used to do so many times before. It was working fine the next morning. I left for work leaving it on at home (but ofcourse!). When I got home later that day the screen was black and it didn't react to mouse or keystroke. I did a hard reset holding down the on/off button. When I turned it back on it loaded the BIOS and then displayed (in a DOS enviroment, prior to loading WinXP) a message with the first line going something like this:

TRAP C0000005 =========== EXCEPTION ==========

Lines below that contained information concerning the state of flags and registers.
And thats it. Its stuck there and all I can do is turn it off.

I can enter the BIOS, and I can see minor glitches in displaying it on the screen - a couple of lines that separate sections of BIOS information are "broken" (discontinuous) and pieces of it are moved a couple of pixels to the right. Nothing big, just a couple of pixels are misplaced. BIOS is readable no trouble whatsoever.

The only thing that happend while I was at work is my wife wiping the laptop off with a damp cloth. Not wet, but damp. While the machine was on. And she also said it was weird that it didnt react ot keystokes which occured while wiping the keyboard off. The screen was black when she started cleaning it and it remained black. So I doubt the problem was caused with her using a damp cloth, since it wasn't the first time we used to clean the laptop like that.

Now I suspect the graphic card might have had it (overheating or something) but I can't be sure. The disk drive seems fine, as I've tested it connecting it to a desktop pc via USB.

Guys I hope there is someone that can tall me for sure what went wrong and whether it can be fixed or not (for a small price ofcourse).

I'm off to buy a new one, but I have trouble letting this one go easily.
(call me sentimental)

Please Help!

 

Try connecting an external monitor to test if it's the graphics card.

 

Will do, thx for the advice man! If its the graphic card I guess I can throw the damn thing into the trash can because its probably integrated onto the motherboard.

 

Today I eliminated DEP as a possible cause of my problem.

I also checked for the faulty RAM module. Either both are faulty or both are good. So that leaves me nowhere. Need to find a 100% workin pc4200 DDR module to be sure.

And I still have to check the graphic card. I'm off to google for the way the card is installed onto the board (on board or standalone module)

Guys you are strangely quiet... I'm counting on you here... Please help.