Video Card Issues

I've had this laptop for about 5-6 months now, and recently I've been having some problems running games. I keep encountering weird graphical glitches, including spikes, small white pixels appearing randomly on the screen, and these weird colored circles. I took two screenshots of them, and they show the glitches. I'm worried that the graphics card or some other component might be failing. Is there any good way to diagnose this so I can fix it before it becomes a serious problem?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/26/graphics1.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/269/graphics2.png/

 

I take it that you are refering to the purple circles on the first picture?

I cant see anything on the second one?

The issues on the first one are probably dirver/software related. Update you GPU drivers and look for and patches for the game you are playing and see if it still persists

 

I guess it isn't visible in the second picture because it's scaled down, there are random white pixels scattered all over the place. And in the first there are also a few long lines from some 3d model's coordinates getting screwed up. It's only a minor nuisance at the moment, but I'm just worried that it could be the beginning of more serious problems.

So far it is just in games, and I've only played a few games recently but I've seen this in all of them. The games run with steam, and any patches should be automatically downloaded. I did try updating the drivers for the graphics card through the device manager, but it said I had the most up to date version.

The graphics card is a Radeon HD 5870, and I don't know whether it being a laptop graphics card means it requires different driver software than a desktop would. The driver is from December of '09, version 8.683.000. I looked at the AMD website and couldn't find anything helpful, and a search for drivers didn't turn up anything useful. Am I being very dense and missing something on the AMD website? I would think any driver software could be found there.

I used the following form for a search which turned up no driver software:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

 

Try These.

Version 8.861
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

You will need to pick Notebook graphics from the first dropdown, Radeon HD from the Second, Mobility Radeon HD 5XXX Series from the third and what ever OS from the 4th
They are a bit newer and may help.

Edit: To avoid confusion the release number 11.6 is the Catalyst version. In the release notes the drivers are specified as being 8.861.

 

When it finished installing I got a blue screen error. After the laptop restarted, the resolution couldn't be moved above 1100-something when it was previously at 1600x900. Rolling back the driver to 8.683 fixed it, so I'm back where I started now.

I'm starting to suspect the video card may have overheated at some point and suffered some physical damage. Earlier today, it crashed while running Mass Effect. After restarting the computer and starting up the game again, I noticed that the whole screen became distorted whenever I ran. This is probably an issue with the motion blur effect used when the character runs. This never happened before today, so whatever the problem is it just got a little worse.

I'm going to try underclocking it, according to one site that may solve the problem or at least confirm that it's a hardware issue.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/underclockvid/slowdown.html