Is my laptop dying?

[dendawg]

Hey ho, having a few issues with my laptop, as you may have guessed from the title.

What happens is that I talk to my GF on a daily basis on Yahoo messenger. At some point in the conversation, the screen will suddenly blank out into a color. The color is different every time. It can be reversed by my closing the lid and re-opening it, which puts the laptop into sleep mode and I reawaken it. However I usually have to reboot, because if i don't it usually happens again, at which point I may have to do a hard reboot (removing the battery and unplugging the charger.)

I have a 6-year old Dell Inspiron B130, 1.5 Celeron M processor, 2 GB Ram, with Win XP SP3 with all the updates. Unfortunately, replacing is not really an option since it's not in the budget. I doubt the problem lies in my hard drive, as I have yet to hear any clicking noises.

I'm planning on downloading the newest version of Yahoo messenger after this to eliminate that as the cause. Any help would be appreciated.

Damn my fingers are sore from all the typing.

Dendawg

edit: I should also mention that I let my laptop run all day/night because i don't sleep worth a damn anymore.

[It's me]

Sounds a lot like an overheating problem. It's probably full of dust... you might try to clear it yourself by using a can of compressed air to force air through its ventilation backwards to blow out the dust bunnies. (With the computer turned off of course!)

[TheSHAD0W]

If clearing it out doesn't help, the next step is a new OS install. It could be a bad driver.

[Chromatix]

Six years old - does it have an Nvidia graphics chip by any chance? You can use GPU-Z to find out.

[dendawg]

Six years old - does it have an Nvidia graphics chip by any chance? You can use GPU-Z to find out.

Intel 915GM.