Alright so I know this is most likely a hardware failure of some kind that is untreatable but I figured I would just confirm with you guys. Sorry its so long but I wanted to try and provide as much of the story as possible so you guys can understand whats going on. Any and all help will be GREATLY appreciated ty.
Ok so recently my HP dv9000 laptop started gradually loosing video capabilities. The whole problem occured when my computer screen slowly started to show horizontal lines scattered all over the place. But I could still use my computer but after a few minutes the lines appeared everywhere and my computer locked up forcing me to restart. When I restarted everything was fine again and I went to bed with the computer left on doing a disk defrag. The next morning I came back to my computer on w/ a black screen and everything was frozen. So I restart the computer and right before you see the login screen these lines appear again all over the place. Its hard to describe them but they usually cover most of the screen and are white / blue or red in color over black background. They occasionally will jump around and whatnot.
The weirdest part is that for most of that day I would turn the computer off and back on trying to fix / diagnose it and sometimes I would be able to get to the login screen and even into the operating system without the problem happening. But pretty much for that whole day the problem would occur on and off. Sometimes I would restart and get stuck with this garbled screen right before the login screen. Other times that may happen but then it would move past that and I could get into the operating system. But the lines would slowly appear again and then gradually the whole computer would freeze leaving me clueless as to whats going on. How could my video card be partially shot seeing as how I was getting video perfectly sometimes and not others? Why is it that system restore is not solving the issue? Why is it that reinstalling my nvida drivers are not helping at all? Whats really really weird is that all of that stuff happened like a month ago. Suddenly the next day the problem was pretty much gone and for nearly a month I had no issues. But then suddenly just the other day... bam its back again. I think I should add that I have also been using a 24" HP LCD monitor which is what I was using when this problem started happening. And also when I was using the larger screen I would have my laptop closed and it would get pretty hot. I am thinking that perhaps somehow it got too hot or the external screen messed up my video card in some way.
Anyway so ok it gets better. So I also formatted my hard drive today and reinstalled windows vista home as a last resort and guess what as soon as I updated my video drivers to nvidia's I get the same problem only this time I can never get back to the login screen under those conditions. The only way I can get video now is to use the Standard Display Adapater in 1024X768 screen resolution. Under those conditions I have no problems. Everything else is working stellar too but as soon as I try to update my display drivers to nvidia's, after I restart i am welcomed to the same video problem I had so obiviously a fresh operating system isnt solving the problem leading me to believe its hardware related. What I dont get is when this problem first started I could sometimes get past the login screen and now I can never even see the login screen. I am always left stranded with the garbled lines apon startup before the login screen pops up.
So my question is this... at this point is there anyway I can tweak my computer to allow the nvidia drivers to work so I can at least get my screen resolution of 1440X990 back. I was going to turn down the hardware acceleration of the video card to see if that helps but I cant get back into the system with the nvida drivers in use to do that. I was also thinking about underclocking my computer to see if that will allow the video card to function using the real drivers. I donno I am so lost and I just dont want to believe my hardware is destroyed due to some simple stupid mistake like letting the unit get to hot. If anyone could please give me a few suggestions to try or confirm that my hardware is faulty I would greatly appreciate it ty for reading.
