[Troubleshoot] Ray Sum's Graphics card crashing (Part 6)

Continued from:
http://wai-pc.blogspot.com/2011/09/troubleshoot-ray-sums-graphics-card_7457.html

OK an update from the last few days: (starting from Wednesday 28th)
A tad bit of light reading...
>> Nvidia's forums for Geforce M series: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showforum=202
     >>> Most sensible answer/excuse for crashing is overheating due to drivers:
             http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=206597&st=0&p=1272274&hl=330m&fromsearch=1&#entry1272274
             and something called a DPC Latency
             http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=188633&st=0&p=1187409&hl=330m&fromsearch=1&#entry1187409

A different bit of light reading though then explains a 'connectorgate' issue (bad solder or connection between gfx card and motherboard or something along those lines)
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1137385/nvidia-bad-bump-misery-deepens
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/142730-beans-nvidia-connectorgate-issue.html
Will check these out more in depth next chance I get to sit down for a while!

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Back to the tests then
Somewhere along the lines I found out that Windows Vista onwards included a driver verifier tool to test drivers for problems http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;244617
and so I tried this in safe mode, where the tests wouldn't run then in normal mode where they ran but no errors found.

Whilst this was happening I used my desktop PC and whilst doing more research found out that Windows Aero themes are rather resource hogs so I disabled this and changed the setting to windows default.

I then installed a 'classic' game of mine, Battlefield 2, downloaded and applied the patch v1.5 and launched single player games with 16 bots (no settings were amended.)
After 2 games taking 1 hour, the system hadn't crashed or anything (so I thought it's windows!)

The next few day however it did a number of 'bad' things:
* The glitch-y graphics came back (once) and an unannounced automatic shut down!
However this was after changing the video setting in battlefield to the widescreen resolution.
One thing that could be noticed was that the laptop was BOILING HOT!!!! See photo of my desk and you will understand that I couldn't easily use either computers (Toshiba laptop fan's on the left (where the mice are!)
According to Toshiba's PC Health Monitor the CPU temperature was only 50% of maximum (what is the maximum though? and why does it not show graphics card temperature!?)

I'm definitely gonna have to buy some sort of temperature sensor to test whether its a cooling problem.
Thinking about it though I'm sure there should be a desktop app that checks the temperature (something to do  over next few days!)

Since then Wai On's had a play (supposedly on facebook) and it crashed 3 times according to WhoCrashed all of the 0x116 (0xFFFFFA80097E0010, 0xFFFFF88004892180, 0x0, 0x2) / Video TDR Error!

So long story short (only change is no Windows Aero theme!)
* Crappy graphics card settings in Battlefield works fine (6 games to date so crashes)
* Increase to 1366*768 widescreen resolution and it appears to overheat, 1 garbled crash and 5 premature shut downs
* Light computer use including Facebook by Wai On (3 crashes over 30 minutes)
Conclusion Ray Sum should forget her social life and start gaming!