Experiencing very weird laptop symptoms???

Okay, so if I watch a video, flash movie, or even sometimes scrolling through text, my laptop will shut off on me. Only after a while though. The screen turns black, I can see the hard drive doing something, and then it's gone; however, once I turn it back on, it won't shut off on me.

Today I was playing a game with my friend. It shut off, so I rebooted. Restarted the game. About every 10 minutes or so I would experience severe video lag. It wasn't network lag, but the graphics. I tried making it 800x600 and it still was lagging. It was UT2004 and it never had a problem on high settings @ 1680x1050. Then out of nowhere the lag just disappears. It makes no sense! There aren't any artifacts when playing the games, etc. It's just really, really weird.

It even happened in Spore Creature Creator.

Bump.

Is this on a laptop or on a desktop? The reason i ask is because i am curious if you ahve integrated video or a dedicted video card. If you have a video card, it is possible taht your card is begining to fail . I have experienced similar issues in the past as my card had heat issues. If this is the case try upping the cooling. however, once damage is done it cannot be reveresed, a new GPU may be in order.

You may also want to attempt to update the graphics driver as well as this could help.

Vista or XP? give us some of yoru system specs...

Lastly, you may want to run a 3D benchmark or video card stress test to see if it fails or not, this could give you direction as to whether its that speccific component or not.

hope this helps and let us know!

It's a laptop (if you read the title), running Windows Vista (32-bit).

I was reading that nvidia's 8400m and 8600m chips have been labeled as faulty...so maybe that's the problem. I have an 8600m GT. So I'm probably not the only one with this problem. This card is in many laptops + Macbook Pros.

http//www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-chips-faulty/

Hmm. Hopefully nvidia will come out with a fix.

Everyone be prepared to give answers that he will never follow.

[quote10d0768d57="TFOAF"]It's a laptop (if you read the title), running Windows Vista (32-bit).

I was reading that nvidia's 8400m and 8600m chips have been labeled as faulty...so maybe that's the problem. I have an 8600m GT. So I'm probably not the only one with this problem. This card is in many laptops + Macbook Pros.

http//www.engadget.com/2008/07/10/all-nvidia-8400m-8600m-chips-faulty/

Hmm. Hopefully nvidia will come out with a fix.[/quote10d0768d57]
This concerns me, but I haven't had any issues yet with the 8600M GT in my VAIO.

I have seen many issues with Vista and drivers in general, specifically graphics and audio drivers.