Qosmio Graphics Card Problems

Hi,

Posting here on behalf of my sister whom I resident tech support for! Her boyfriends laptop has become unusable.

He was getting messages saying he was low on memory, however he has 2gb of ram and the system had been running fine for 3 years.

She says: "his display is screwed and it can't even be used at the moment. he got a message that there was a nvidia display driver error. he tried to download the driver again from the toshiba website but it just made it even worse. sometimes it is black with dotted lines going up and down the screen (matrix style), sometime random patterned block of colour... it is basically unusable. he tried to reload windows but couldn't even do that cos he couldn't use the screen. starting in safe mode is slightly better. sometime it will be ok, but sometimes ust as bad as in normal mode. any suggestions? "

I'm a bit stuck as to what can be done.

Is this indicative of a physical problem with the graphics card?

Could the card be loose? Does anyone know if the card connections are in an accessible position?

When trying to reload windows the screen is still not working properly and after a few screen you can no longer navigate the setup options. The laptop has been reloaded in the past with success.

He's running Vista. The full model number is Toshiba Qosmio F30-117

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Thanks