Random lockups--bad video drivers?

So--my Toshiba Satellite A75-S209, two months old, is my first laptop ever, and has been lovely (other than occasionally getting indignant and turning itself off, quite understandably, when I was blocking its fans). However, in the last week it's started completely locking up on me. It'll just go completely unresponsive, ctrl-alt-delete does nothing, and I have to turn it off by holding the power button down for 5 sec. The first time this happened (perhaps last Tuesday?) I had just put in a DVD and the laptop was sitting quietly on my desk. The other times (I think 4 times in the last 2-3 days) I've been sitting on the couch with it on my lap. I can't think of any rhyme or reason to the lockups except all the times I've been using it on my lap, the lockup happened when I was NOT using the computer at all for a second--like I'd move it off my lap and set it down, go get a drink or something, come back and it would be hosed. The only thing I could think of was that moving it while it was running did--something? I don't know if this makes sense. I have done plenty of moving the computer around while it's running since I've had it, and never had this problem before.

I saw a thread on another forum which indicated that bad video drivers are a common cause of exactly this problem--intuitively, this makes more sense to me because I installed the Omega drivers for my vid card (ATI Radeon 9000) recently--in fact, very shortly before I started having this problem. Does this explanation make sense? Has anyone else had a similar problem with this computer, this card, these drivers, anything?

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, but as I really don't know if it's a hardware problem or a software problem or a Toshiba-specific problem or what, I didn't really know where to post this. Thanks for any help.

 

Well, moving a laptop is certainly not going to cause it to Bluescreen, but you do tend to get paranoid about what's causing a computer to do such things when they're hard to explain [ ]

Sounds like it's either some type of background service or bad memory causing the blue screen. And since you mention the drivers were installed soon before this issue, I think uninstalling those and seeing if that helps is the first step you should take.

With the laptop that I have (ThinkPad T40) there's a built-in restore and recovery application so if something like this happens to me I recover to a state my machine was in a couple of days ago. It might be worth getting an application such as Norton Ghost which allows you to make an exact copy of the state your computer is in and then if something like this happens to you, then you can just recover back to a time when your laptop was working correctly.