i have a dell 1420 laptop... with 8400M gs graphic card

while playing fifa09, screen went wired colors, then it just restarted. took a couple of reboots to even get the dell logo to come up. it load up, i started watching .avi file after like 45m it crash again. wired colors.. sound was still going but then after a while it just restarted. took alot more attempts to get the dell logo to come up. at first i thought it was the driver, so i updated that when i finally got vista back up. but after restart and going back to watch the movie it crashed again. i thought it may have been over heating.. but core temp dont go above 50C.

any ideas what could be wrong? it seems to me that the graphic card is destroyed but then how is it able to run windows aero.

ps. im using the laptop right now to type this.. it doesnt seem unstable under vista but loses it when opening a video file.

Do you have Vista's SP1 installed? If not, install it

ya im using vista sp1... now even vista is unstable.. i think the graphic card is dead, it gets to vista welcome screen and after i type in my password it crashes after a couple minutes no matter what i am doing.... and dell is saying since its out of warranty its gonna cost me 499.. which is crazy considering the system was bought for 1400 and can be bought new for 1100 or less. all in CDN$

any suggestions? im a univ student so my life goes around that laptop..

Try doing a system restore... You may have to reinstall some Vista updates after doing the restore. Have you checked your laptop for viruses and other malware?

imma do a system restore. hope it works.. 499 to repiar it doesnt make much sense to me..

as to how the computer works and just shuts down when its strained...is it possible for some streaming processors to die on a GPU? and strain the rest so they would over load and crash?

Your laptops cooling fins and fan(s) might need cleaning, but 50C is not bad for a laptop. $499 sounds like they would like you to purchase a new laptop from them...

thanks Tmagic for ur help

system restore to last week didnt work.

well i found this link to

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/arch...ate-limited-warranty-enhancement-details.aspx

website which said that th nvidia 8400m chipset (in my laptop) was expecting a higher than normal failure rate.. therfore dell had extended my warrnty related to GPU for another year. i taked to the tech support guys from dell for like 2 hours where i guided him to that website ( which is like dells public relations site) and convinced him that mine falls under the warranty.. after his attempt to fix my comp remotely.. he said that they are gonna fix mine for free under the extended warranty which only covers gpu failure or anything related and cause by it.

the link describes the same symptoms as mine so my problem is defiantly hardware.

so whoever else has a 8400 gs on some dell laptop check that link and see if urs falls under the extended warranty.