Laptop screen black except for white band at top

I have HP dv9000 running windows Vista x64
and I think it has an nVidia 9800 graphics card

I was playing a game when the laptop screen locked up, and went black, then the computer rebooted. On reboot it claimed to have recovered from an unexpected shut down.

I continued playing for 20 mins without problems before my screen locked up again, went black, then came back on. This time it claimed to have recovered from a driver error: "driver error nvlddmvm has stopped working and recovered" at least that's what I think it was.

It did this multiple times before the screen went black and did not recover. I was still able to use my push to talk key with ventrilo to tell my friends about the problem for 10 mins. Finally I shut it down from their advice.

Now on boot the majority of the screen is black. A white band made up of 3" vertical one pixel bars appears at the top of the screen and slowly migrates to the left until completely gone off screen. The far right of the band is technicolor bars.

I'm no longer sure if my keyboard works on boot, and I am unable to control volume with the peripheral keys, though I can use the ones that activate and deactivate the touchpad.