Laptop screen often goes black/off by itself - problems rebooting

Hi,

I am running Windows Vista Home Premium on my Dell laptop. Recently my laptop screen has been suddenly going blank by itself. When the laptop runs fine, the screen suddenly runs into red & black strips, & then turns totally black. After numerous attempts of restarting the machine, sometimes I succeed in getting the laptop back to normal. This has been happening quite often recently.

This actually started a few months back. After wandering through different forums and suggested solutions, I think, I correctly found out that the problem was not with the screen (as I could see the same problem with display even after connecting my laptop to a TV screen). As suggested on one of the forums (lost the link ...) I installed an updated nvidia display driver. That seemed to help for a few days.... However, the problem is back & occurs severely more often.

I have very important (two years worth) research work on this laptop, & can't afford to lose it. Does anyone have any idea of what's going wrong here? Can anybody help me resolve this problem and bring my laptop back on track?

Basic system information:
- x86 (32-bit)
- Original installed OS
- OEM
- System is 3 years old
- OS installation is 3 years old


Thank you,
Shirish

Well we have a rule about double posting, but not really sure about quadruple posting, but lets assume its three too many.

richc46 said:

Well we have a rule about double posting, but not really sure about quadruple posting, but lets assume its three too many.

Click to expand...

Well, sorry about multiple posts. I wasn't (and still am not) sure about which forum to seek help from. Please let me know which forum should I stick to, & I'll take back other posts.

Thanks,
Shirish

It no problem, I have notified administration, they will delte the improper posts.

I would start with the graphics card and driver
Go to search and type device manage.
Any yellow warnings posters, should be investigated and corrected
Update the graphics driver. (check it again)
Reseat the graphics card.
Try with clean boot and see if the problem persiists. If it does try in safe mode.
Run a full aniti virus scan
Download and run malwarebytes full scan and after update.
Go to search type event viewer and the next time it happens go to event viewer from search and look for errors.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Youre either overheating, or youre gpu is about to die.

Youre work is safe as I'm 99% sure its only video card related.

You can solve the heat most likely by blowing out the intakes and exhaust.
You can't fix a dieing video card.