Unknown graphics card degradation trouble.

[El Moose Monstero]

If anyone can help with this admittedly vague problem, it would be appreciated.

I've got a 2 year old Presario 2175US laptop, XP, 40gig HD, with an ATI Radeon IGP 320M graphics card in it, half a gig of ram, currently running the Omega drivers for ATI. Over the past few months, the computer has been increasingly unable to cope - games that used to run fine no longer run at all, Freelancer used to work fine, but I reinstalled it this week and it can't get past the opening cutscene (although the 1 time it has, it did actually get to the real game and played it fine), Homeworld 2 gets about 4 mins into the game then something happens and it locks up, emulator programs cause the thing to occassionally simply turn off without warning. The rest of the computer works fine, I can do my work on it, I can play CivIII and BF1942 just fine, but something somewhere isn't right and I don't really know how to find out what.

I've updated to the newest DirectX, I've run spyware, adaware, antivirus etc but I think the problem is more to do with software talking to hardware than any malicious piece of code, any thoughts on how to proceed?

EDIT: Disabling the line in the ini file for freelancer which plays the movies resulted in the rest of the game loading fine, so that problem at least is something to do with the way my computer plays the fmv's.

[Netko]

Well, I've had similar issues some time ago with my partly fried geforce ti4200 (it caused lockups and other problems seemingly at random, with frequency totaly randomly depending on game - some taxing games ran great, some graphicly simple ones crashed quickly, and the expected reverse as well), so its possible there are hardware problems, however I wouldn't jump to that conclusion without some more proof (like say problems persisting after a format/reinstall - however this is not the route I recommend going since hopefully people with less destructive suggestions will show up).

Try running the official drivers from the notebook manufacturer (I know omegas are official with just a few tweaks, however integrated and notebook graphics tend to have more compatibility problems then desktop cards).

Be warned however that if it turns out to be hardware, laptop motherboard replacements tend to be expensive (to the point of it actualy being sensible to buy a new laptop).