T41 XP BSOD graphics ati2dvag

My laptop started crashing (Blue Screen of Death) and whining about
looping in ati2dvag.dll which is a display driver for the ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card/chip. I have tried latest ati2dvag.dll driver from ATI/AMD and Microsoft.

The graphics diagnostics utility fails to complete.

Do you know if the Lenovo(IBM) T41 has a separate graphics mini-card and I might try re-seating it or if it's a chip and if so, is it likely to be reparable at economic cost?

I'm now limping along on a resolution of 640x480 (ati2dvag.dll driver is disabled so I get the default) and Internet Explorer keeps crashing on any page it finds difficult and Firefox is worse. If I boot in Safe Mode I can get a decent screen resolution with a VGA (SVGA?) safe graphics driver, but then I can't contact the internet.

Update - The next step was to introduce a plain vga driver. That runs for about 10 mins and then the screen goes black but everything continues running OK although that's not much use, really. Another glitch is that any movement causing the motion detector to fire an interrupt sends the screen irrecoverably blank but processing continues OK.

If I put the m/c in the fridge for 20 mins before starting then it will keep the screen working for considerably longer.

I would be grateful for any enlightening remarks.

Regards,
Jed

Thank you for the reply. You are right about the warranty. I'll give that a try when I can find the recovery disk.

Can I ask, please, why you think it's not a hardware problem or what it might be?

Thanks again,
Jed