9750 6 months and starting to act up!

I purchased the laptop from PCTorque in Feb. and have had no issues till now.

Here are the issues:

1) All of a sudden I'm having very slow boot times. I looked in the BIOS (F2) for the fast boot option and did not see it. After not seeing it I requested a newer BIOS version and installed it, still no fast boot option. Am I missing something here? What screen is it in?

2) I'm seeing a screen right after turning on that searching for a RAID config? Any ideas what this is and could it be related to the slow boot times?

Now for the real problem...

After turning it on, waiting through the slow boot times and the delay in the Windows log in screen, everything loads and the notification area of the Taskbar is filled. About a minute later the screen will suddenly go blank, come back up with a random desktop color, and the screen is full of ripples overlaying (I can still see the icons) the desktop. The ripples are in a pattern of about 1 square inch boxes. It will then begin to blink from blank to this funky screen ripple thing and lock up. Is this a video card going bad or what? Has anyone had this problem?

I'm obviously not much of a troubleshooter so any ideas or suggestions would be great...(RMA time?)

I've sent SAGER an email and haven't gotten a response yet, so I thought I would give the forum a shot. It has been a valuable tool in the past.

Thanks for the advice, my gut feeling was telling me the same thing. It is a shame to have to go this route, but here we go...

Thanks again.

The fan is running high and low speeds, w/ F2 working fine. Another thing I have noticed is a strange popping or cracking sound occationally, all these things have started within a few days from each other. Obviously indicating a problem, hopefully one that can be resolved with only small doses of pain killers...