M55 series ATI Video driver gone bad??

Hello all. Well I'm quite peeved at Toshiba. After having this laptop for 6 months my display is crapping out on me. I am by no means a newbie to computers and troublshooting.

At first I would get weird displays like garbage lines and the screen would freeze. Ok that was the start. I decided to look into updating the driver for the built in ati graphics card. I'm not too sure, but I think I was able to download one from ati.com that was compatible and seemed like it fixed the problem for a while. Then after being ok for a month or so, things got werse. Instead of the display looking crappy it would just hang.... Then blue screen of death and restart. When it came back up it said the driver was not working correctly blah blah. I had enough of it and reformatted and reimaged from the factory cd's. Yet again it seemed happy for a week... Then one day when booting up it says ati control panel had problems loading and would not continute to load. Grrreat. Soooo Thats where its at now.

I have changed hardware acceleration on the card thinking that might have something to do with it. Nope...still hung. Is it possible that my video card has gone bad? After 6 months? I don't use it everyday for long periods of time. Maybe an hour a day and a few hours on the weekend. I'm not bashing the computer or anything, its in perfect shape. Just really dissapointing to go through all of this with a fairly "new" laptop that is already out of warranty. Anyways thats my scenario. If anyone had the same problem or thinks up something provacative or drastic let me know.

Oh I was thinking about putting linux on the laptop and seeing if the driver problem was happier...not sure.. but it might be going down sometime soon if I get pissed enough:ati: .

 

Try running a Linux distro off USB key or CD using the standard video driver and see if the issue arises.
I have the X600 card in mine and it has worked fine so far. Why isn't yours under warranty if it's only 6 months old?

 

Thanks will try that...warranty is only 90 days

 

Well not looking good. I tried the linux theory and that locked up too. GRrr.

 

I think your graphic adapter was defect either its GPU or memory. For example if you do heavy vga overclock, surely it will threaten your card and finally will result permanent damage to your card-yielding artifact or etc I dont know.
But in this case, I'm sure you don't overclock your card, do you

 

Let me guess...you're getting this screen?
http://groups.msn.com/toshibadefectcase/shoebox.msnw?action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=1

Common themes:
Toshiba M55
ATI error message & blue screens
90 day warranties
Started blue-screening in November

Still looking for a fix, but I'm beginning to think there is some flaw with the M55 & ATI drivers.

I'm still looking for a fix / options.

 

Yep, I've certainly seen this happen BUT only when I severely underclock the GPU in NHC. Ever since I left it at default settings, i.e. no over or underclocking, it works fine. No problems on Linux whatsoever using the latest ATI fglrx drivers from Ubuntu repository.

 

Unfortunately, for the programs I need to run, Linux isn't an option.

It was a cheap notebook...I guess you get what you pay for. It is a piece of junk. The problem is that to have it serviced is almost more than the price of a new one...I guess it pays to get the extended warranty coverage, because the 90 day warrant stinks.

 

Yeah, it's a piece of junk. It's always ironic that Linux works best on the cheapest piece of junk, while the super expensive laptops such as Vaios and Qosmio are often Linux-unfriendly.