Serious Graphics card problems...I think

I was playing FEAR online the other day when out of no where i got a BSOD saying the following:


*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vender for support
NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error
*** The system has halted ***

only thing i could do was a hard boot of the system....at which point everything was fine. later that night i left my lappy on (as usual) and went to bed, woke up next morning, opened the lid...and the screen was blank. lappy wasnt sleeping or hibernating, and the screen had power, but no image, no desktop, nothing.

So i restarted and still nothing...waiting about an hour, turned lappy back on and it worked, until i got to the desktop, at which point small squiggly red lines appeared scattered across the desktop. I hit the start orb (I have vista) and it looked quite funny, no transparency, etc...and then the same BSOD as previously stated.

Now lappy never works...the screen gets power, but no image comes up, not even the Dell BIOS splash screen.

Talked to Dell and they're sending me a new LCD and graphics card so I'm hoping that fixes it
But I'm really just wondering what happened to my lappy???
Any insight would be wonderful.

***I ran memtest and it said everything was fine after two passes, so thats why im suspecting its my video card.

Only other thing i've done is put AS5 on the heatsink for my graphics card and CPU...but I cant imaging that possibly affecting it to cause this problem.

Specs are in my signature

HEEELP!

I would, but, I dont know if I didnt make this clear enough, but my monitor doesnt work. It has power but it displays nothing...its just blank....

oooh! yeah sorry I ran memtest yesterday when it was working...but now nothing works....the LCD has power but displays nothing.

So obviously its a memory issue...but I dont know what memory has the problem...RAM (I dont think so b/c memtest said it was ok), graphics memory? system memory?

isnt there some memory built into the motherboard? and could that be causing a problem?

I'm lost on this

thanks!

Well I think the BIOS is loading, but then it realizes that the monitor doesnt work. Because I turn the lappy on, and theres plenty of HD activity, and after about 3-5 minutes or so it restarts itself and repeats the whole process...

*ponders*

I wish I had one to test with....

Hey guys, thanks for responding.
But I got memtest to work 2 days ago. My monitor doesnt work now so booting off of a CD wont work because I cant see what im doing...

I'm just trying to see what a memory parity error actually means.
I've read that some people have found it to be the actual on die cache for the processor. Soo maybe the reason why my screen doesnt work is because my processor isnt working?

Any ideas on a "memory parity error"?
thanks alot

I got a new LCD and graphics card from Dell (oh yeah! I have a warranty...)

put them in today and so far so good.
maybe it was a bad graphics card?

If it happens again I'll be back with updates