Laptop Restarting, No Video

I've got an HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop with Windows Vista. The person that was using it said he was just on ebay browsing, and then the video went all garbled, and then it shut down. After that, upon trying to restart, nothing shows up on the screen and and the computer restarts itself after 20 seconds or so.
Things I've tried:
Switching to external monitor with FnF4- still nothing shows up on external monitor eiher. I'm thinking bad video card, but would a bad vid card make it reboot loop?
There are no flash drives or memory cards or optical discs in the laptop. All of the indicator lights come on when it's restarted, but then it restarts again after 20 seconds or so.
Any help is much appreciated.

 

These models are notorious for failing due to overheating of the Graphics chips. Because you get no video on an external monitor, I would say it is a hardware problem. To omit a software problem, you can try booting with a small linux distro like Puppy.

Google; hp pavillion dv6000 nvidia chip failure

http://www.sfmslaw.com/documents/pdf/nvidia-gpu-complaint.pdf

 

Can you boot to safe mode?

 

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