Video driver quit responding (and has recovered), sometimes bluescreen, Windows Vista

I hope you guys can help me with my problem, you've been a huge help before. Here goes.

In September 2009 I bought an Acer Aspire M5800, with 8Gb DDR, Intel Core 2, 750 Gb hard drive, nVidia GeForce GT230 1.5 Gb display card. It's running Windows Vista home version and I was using IE 7.

This weekend I connected an Inland webcam (plug n play no drivers required!) to the computer so I could Skype with my son in Afghanistan. I was really looking forward to it, too.

A couple of days ago we started getting the error message "display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding but recovered successfully." It took about a million clicks to clear the message.

Today I came home to find the computer running lines and dots...then the BSOD. I tried booting up in the BIOS, and tried running Windows in safe mode, but the BSOD kept appearing. Then, the computer just gave up and now will not even produce the BSOD. I'm really afraid I've fried it.

I could send it back to Acer (in Texas) but I have over 50 Gb of family pix on the hard drive and am afraid they will wipe the memory. I can't even produce a Hijack this log because I can't get the computer to boot up. And of course, I can't find the recovery disks. :cry

Has anyone had a successful recovery from this problem? Or do I just take it back to Fry's & pay them to fix it? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Fortunately I'm writing this from our 'old' computer, the ancient Compaq which while slow, at least boots up. Thanks for your help!

 

Re: Video driver quit responding (and has recovered), sometimes bluescreen, Windows V

Here's some more info on this issue. Now I think it's possible I have a bad fan on the video card, because the computer was able to boot up as normal (after being off for a few days.) I quickly backed everything up, thought it was OK and set it in hibernation mode...and this morning hubby reported it is having the same issue again, lines & dots instead of what the screen is supposed to look like. How hard is it to replace a video card fan? Should I replace the entire card? I've installed cards before, and changed CD-ROM players, is the fan any more complicated? I'll go look in some of the other forum posts before starting a new thread, doesn't look like this one's getting much attention. Thanks anyways.