I have had a Thinkpad T61 (Geforce card) for almost a year now with very little trouble. It was running Vista the entire time. A few days ago, I was playing a game when the screen stuttered. Everything became pixelated and there were strange lines. I rebooted and everything was fine. However, recently it has been crashing very often in Windows and when I go to restart it, the BIOS image doesn't appear and the screen is filled with strange symbols and illegible text. I can usually manage to work my way into Windows anyway, but the screen is stretched and doubled.
It takes several restarts and some messing with an external monitor to get it back to normal.
Today I formatted the machine and installed Windows XP thinking it might be Vista. However, I believe it has to be hardware since it is effecting the machine immediately after boot.
Any advice would be appreciated.
EDIT: Once when it crashed I managed to see an error about the video driver failing and then the screen went blank. This was when the machine still had Vista.
It takes several restarts and some messing with an external monitor to get it back to normal.
Today I formatted the machine and installed Windows XP thinking it might be Vista. However, I believe it has to be hardware since it is effecting the machine immediately after boot.
Any advice would be appreciated.
EDIT: Once when it crashed I managed to see an error about the video driver failing and then the screen went blank. This was when the machine still had Vista.