EPTThis is my first time posting, so if you have any constructive criticism to apply to my post, it is most welcome.
I have a Lenovo r61/r61i laptop that was bought about 3 years ago. I think the situation may be rather hopeless, but maybe some of you who are wiser than I am could maybe shed some light on the situation.
The specs on the computer aren't great, however, until when it broke, I was able to play SC2 on low settings with reasonable results such that I didn't think it was taxing my computer too greatly. My graphics card is an nVidia Quadro NVS 140M, pretty standard amongst the r61s. I am 99% sure that the problem is my graphics card and unfortunately, unless I am mistaken, laptop graphics cards are very difficult, if not impossible, to replace.
About a month ago now (a month without sc2 is a long month indeed) my laptop broke. I had several other programs open one time when I went to load up sc2, and then my computer froze. I rebooted it a couple times and was able to boot up into and use linux for the rest of the night without issue. (I was dual booting vista and ubuntu) The next day I booted back up into windows and after about 10 mins of usage it froze again as before, and gave a BSOD that said something about a hardware malfunction I believe (Really sorry I have no pictures, but I didn't think of it at the time). This problem happened again after that, but sometimes when I was force to power it down myself, the screen would display another problem. The screen would flash between a blank screen and off, but would never show anything. The first couple times I just let the laptop sit after that, and when I turned it on again the problem had sorted itself out, but after the third time it froze again and the screen would not come back on. As an afterthought I will add that there were also weird green dotted vertical lines on the screen when windows started up, but other than that everything was normal except for the freezing.
I decided I had nothing of value on the computer and so I tried to reinstall/restore vista from the recovery discs I had (NOT install discs). The screen problem continued, however I found that by plugging in an external monitor I could continue with the install/recovery. This process went the exact same as the 1-2 times I have done it before except at the final reboot it got hung up on something and eventually restarted itself again. It loaded to one of the windows black screens and gave an error message about loading possibly due to a "hardware or software change". It gave me 5 options, none of which helped and it was stuck in an infinite loop of rebooting itself to this screen. To keep a very long story to merely long in length, I gave the computer to a friend who works in IT for the school board which uses similar computers, and he thought it was a motherboard problem because my function keys did not seem to be working. However, this is not the case as some of them do work. He was able to put windows xp on the computer, but the problem with the screen only being viewable through an external monitor still exists. Furthermore, upon trying to install the drivers for my graphics card (I am sure they were the right drivers) my computer would reboot itself and then blue screen. This is what leads me to believe it is a graphics card problem (I'm pretty intelligent, huh?).
Because of this, the laptop is nearly unusable, even web browsing is impossible because anything requiring scrolling is painfully slow. Any ideas as to what can be done/what the problem is/what caused the problem are appreciated because even if it is impossible for it to be fixed, I'd still like to know what happened to it.
On a side note, since I'm not getting my hopes up for this one, what are possibilities for uses for the laptop? It may be a dumb question, but are there ways to salvage anything useful from it?
Thank you if you waded through that mass of text, I just was unsure what was critical information and what was unnecessary.
Specs:
Intel Core Duo processor T7500(2.2GHz)
2 GB RAM
14.1-inch WXGA+ (1440 x 900 resolution) TFT display
Windows Vista Business 32-Bit
nVidia Quadro NVS 140M
