Failing 8600m gs?

[Guest Harp]

Hello all, I've got a bit of a problem with my graphics card, and/or the drivers.

I've got a HP pavillion dv9500t with the 8600m gs running with vista 32. I've never overclocked either, and I actually changed back from drivers on this site to HP specific drivers a few months ago (I sometimes had to close the lid and open it to get rid of a black screen during start-up).

Anyway, I was playing civ 4, which isn't too intensive, and norton scanned my system and eveything crashed. I know, I know. The thing is that I'm in France for an internship, so the system clock was way off of my time.

I started back up later and everything crashed again. I tried half-life 2 and titan quest. both crashed almost instantly, even when the laptop was cool to the touch. I had recieved NVLDDMKM driver failures in past, albeit fairly rarely. These crashes are blue screens with a message along the lines of "display driver failed to recover"

Anyway, I've restored the system, I've changed drivers a few times (usually to HP's newest), and I've run checks on my hard drive and ram. Everything seems fine. I've also tried running without the battery, which didn't change anything. I scanned for viruses, etc and that came up nill also.

Now I can't even boot with nvidia drivers. I get to the welcome screen and then get a pattern of dots, or rgb lines going crazy, or just a corrupted welcome screen. Of course, HP is no help, and I would have to ship the laptop back to relaitves in the US to get warranty work.

The odd thing, at least to me, is that the computer works when I remove the drivers and let windows install standard vga drivers or whatever it does. Except, that sometimes white shows up with little light blue dots in it.

Anyway, is this something that drivers might fix?