Potential Laptop Woes?

[DarkSilver]

So I'm thinking I may soon be having serious problems with my laptop....
I don't feel like dealing with their tech support just yet....so here's to asking all of you.

Specs on it first off (as a just incase)
HP Pavillion dv8000
Turion 64Mobile ML-34 processor
ATI Radeon Xpress 200m
1gig RAM
Windows XP Media Center Edition

So last evening I was surfing the web, nothing fancy, had Firefox and Trillian open. No games or anything. My screen goes black. I expected it to be a few second thing, since it's happened before (the driver has been crashing since I did the last update to the latest ones from HP). So a minute passes, with no change, no sound, just a black screen and all lights still lit up.

I restart the laptop, and it works fine. I chalk it up to a one time driver screwup and move on.

This morning, I had Firefox and trillian open again, just closed off the tab for IGN and was about to look through my morning webcomics, when my mouse stops moving, and the screen starts....well..fading out, starting from the edges, and working inward to the center. After this occurs, the screen is that faint blackish-grey that happens when power is put but no video signal.

Again, all the appropriate lights were on the laptop (they never went out), but I had to restart the laptop before I could do anything on it again.

So.....my question is...any idea what's going on with it? Should I break down and call HP tech support to get it dealt with, (luckily I still have some of the original warrenty, not to mention the 2yr extended warrenty I purchased through Circuit City when I got it...) or is it just a really bad driver issue and I should roll it back asap?

Advise me, Sdnetizens...

[General Zod]

Sounds like a likely hardware failure. If it's still under warranty, might want to get it looked at.

[phongn]

Your laptop could be going into thermal shutdown - try blasting out the fan intake with canned air.

[FSTargetDrone]

This morning, I had Firefox and trillian open again, just closed off the tab for IGN and was about to look through my morning webcomics, when my mouse stops moving, and the screen starts....well..fading out, starting from the edges, and working inward to the center. After this occurs, the screen is that faint blackish-grey that happens when power is put but no video signal.

I had a similar occurance with my laptop's screen this afternoon. I tried a variety of things but I concur with phongn above, sounds like a heat issue which seemed to be the case with mine. A little working over with my compressor and (dry) airbrush and the problem went away hours ago and hasn't returned.

Damn dust...