Video card driver problem?

[The 9th Sage]

Ok, here's the story...I end up for some reason waking up at 5 AM this morning, only to see my computer that I had left on during the night downloading something with uTorrent cycling through a weird error backed by a black screen...it said something about my ethernet card in my laptop. O_o

So I'm like ok...I try to boot, it doesn't work, finally I get it in safe mode, but I can't figure out what is wrong...then it stops booting into safe mode entirely and I start having other weird problems like this bootdisk I have, fdisk on that bootdisk wouldn't see the hard drive at all, etc...I spend about two hours doing this then pretty much give up. A pretty miserable way to start the day, half asleep trying to fix a random computer problem. >_<

Anyway, after work, I try booting my PC again and it's working. Yay! Everything seems fine...except my video card isn't acting right. The drivers don't seem to be working, it says the card can't start. Crap.

So, any suggestions on how to fix it or determine exactly what happened? My only guess is that it overheated somehow, but I don't really have any concrete evidence. If all else fails, at the very least my data is intact and I should be able to send it in under my extended warranty plan.
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[pipes]

It would suck if your harddrive was going out.
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[CEpeep]

> It would suck if your harddrive was going out.
>

Oh, really?
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[The 9th Sage]

> > It would suck if your harddrive was going out.
> >
>
> Oh, really?

I don't think it's that...I think maybe the laptop was just chugging because the video card was on it's way out and it fucked everything else up. It seems to be running reliably now....I still wish I knew why it decided to suddenly do this, esepcially since I wasn't having my computer do anything that might be considered intensive work in any way shape or form.

Logically it must have happened...I wake up, my laptop is sitting there going 'duuuuh', it works unreliably, then stops working at all. I come back later and it appears to work perfectly fine except for the video card which is apparently 'broken' now.

Sucks too...used to be able to run ZSNES in 1024x768 with graphical enhancements and such, now I can barely run it in 640x480 with nothing of the sort. Must be in some kind of odd software drawing mode.
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[Cornellius]

> It would suck if your harddrive was going out.

No, it's fun. You lose all your data, and you don't have the time to burn it onto DVDs. Also, you can't use the HD anymore. Good times.
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[pipes]

I'm just thinking maybe your disk is fucked and drivers may have gotten somehow corrupted and along with other things. If fdisk didn't pick it up then I would say your drive is probly fucking up. Try and reinstall the drivers. See what happens.
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[The 9th Sage]

> I'm just thinking maybe your disk is fucked and drivers may
> have gotten somehow corrupted and along with other things.
> If fdisk didn't pick it up then I would say your drive is
> probly fucking up. Try and reinstall the drivers. See what
> happens.

No, I tried that....the disk is normal now. I ran a lengthy error check as well. It's weird...I couldn't see anything on there, but then it was erm...back. O_O
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[RaiBlastoise]

Without limiting the speed, the computer will try to write to the disk too fast and hard drive problems/crashing could occur. (I used to have to limit the download speed of LimeWire at Sonic's house to 120kB/s or else the computer would crash [I was using an external HDD].) It could be that that is your problem, or does uTorrent already have a feature to prevent that?

P.S. Sorry about grammar, I got only 4 Hours of sleep last night.
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[Goku]

Have you tried looking at the event logs?

Right click on My computer
Select Manage
Open Event Viewer
Check the System Log and Application Log


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[The 9th Sage]

> Have you tried looking at the event logs?

I hadn't thought to, actually....looking at the System logs, I think I see the day I started having the trouble...basically an error saying that a crap load of services couldn't start. It would seem that just after that it recorded a bunch of errors of one of the IDEports not starting, coupled with an error in a 'paging operation' on my hard drive, if I'm reading it right on the D: drive where my swap file is, so that'd make sense. :P

A bit further on is what I'm thinking must be the string of attempts I made at turning it on that just froze on the windows startup screen...they mention some services starting, then DCOM failing...it repeats this a few times so I'm thinking that is what it is.

Hmm....doesn't help me a lot. Application logs even less so, except that apparently ATI Smart Start is starting up even though my video card seems to be shot to hell. Interesting to note anyway.
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[Goku]

Have you tried running a chkdsk to verify you hard drive does not have bad sectors.

Have you tried running a memory utility like memtest or microsoft memory diagnostic tool (thttp://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp) to check your memory. If your videocard uses shared memory and your memory has a bad module, it will effect your videocard.

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[The 9th Sage]

> Have you tried running a chkdsk to verify you hard drive
> does not have bad sectors.

First thing I did.

> If your videocard uses shared memory and your
> memory has a bad module, it will effect your videocard.

Checked that, everything came up green.
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[pipes]

your vid card works but you only get safemode like vid settings. Have you checked the monitor drivers? Is it set as a plug and play or some crazy shit?
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[The 9th Sage]

> your vid card works but you only get safemode like vid
> settings. Have you checked the monitor drivers? Is it set
> as a plug and play or some crazy shit?

Hmm...actually, maybe I'm just stupid tonight (as it's after midnight here) but I'm not finding it now...I seem to remember it was set to something that sounded generic...I'm sure I tried to 'fix' it. I'm not sure what it was seen as before anyway.

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