nomen-omen

To start with my specs are:

Core 2 Duo T5250
GF 8600M GS (256 MB)
3 GB DDR2 RAM
anyhow it's HP Pavilion dv9640us (upgraded ram)
running on VISTA 32-bit

My m/b was replaced last autumn coz I burned it ;p

I have been running 185.20 Vista 32-bit drivers without problems since January. Couple days ago when playing LOTRO my "driver stopped responding and has recovered" but I had to restart the game... Since then it started happeneing more and more often.

Finally, few days ago I thought that there was a driver or software crash becasue whenever I launched the game it kept freezing. After few seconds screen was going blank and then back to normal - well, not entirely. Some parts of graphics were as if after polarisation. And then it freezes once again but for good - with sound.

I've reinstalled VISTA once again hoping there must be clash with other software, tried with couple different drivers but the proplem is still the same. Is there a chance that game updates/patches are causing the problem?

I've run ATITool "Check for Artifacts" mode and the screen went black and never recovered until booted. After retrying ATITool popped up a message that "Kernel Mode Driver seem not to be running" but I've done nothing to the driver.

Funny thing is that I'm using my laptop now and it's OK... there's no problems in device manager and I can use anything but the games that strain my GC...

So now the question I have been dreading to ask myslef: Is my graphics card any memory block down? It cant be all faulty otherwise it wouldnt let me boot up...