Laptop hit the bucket

Sony VGN-FE790p
2 GB memory
Nvidia GO 7600
Windows XP/Ubuntu 8.10


The other day I was playing darkfall, when a popup appeared saying "you may have a virus, from AVG" I just thought it was crazy since I have never had a virus affect me in the ~3 years ive had this laptop.

A few minutes later my screen got really funky looking and crashed. I tried recovering a few times, but I could only get my computer to start in safe mode. And when I tried to boot normally my screen would be blank. I assumed its my video card that fried since in safe-mode it bypasses the video card acceleration.

My belief was reinforced from the fact that my boot screen has strange lines in it, this is right when I turn it on, and it does the memory check, lets me check my bios etc.

After trying alot of things I eventually wrote zeros (a few passes) to my hard-drive and reinstalled windows xp. I came to the same issue of not being able to install video drivers.

I believe my laptop video card is done for, but I want to get some opinions and advice on if it could be something else. I can get into safemode if any programs could help narrow it down.

I opened the laptop to make sure my gpu fan is still working, in case i overheated, but that was not the case, it turns on no problem.

I hear people sayin the word "artifacting" and I dont know what that is, but is that what the strange lines I get on boot are?

Furthermore, I know some video cards are soldered into the motherboard,

It doesnt specifically state Nvidia Go 7600, so is that good news with possible directly replacing the card with a different Go 7600?

Thanks again for the help, any questions you have I will answer, and thank you for taking time to help out a laptop newbie

 

after taking a closer inspection, its pretty clear that the video card is somehow integrated into the motherboard, meaning I need to replace the motherboard itself.

I am gonna dig a little deeper to see if thats, in fact, the case.