I bought my Dell Vostro 1400 (T7250, 8400m) in April '08 and it started showing symptoms of failed graphics since June '09. I used the laptop for gaming too, not sure if that accelerate the problem to surface. Here's some photos of the corrupted screens:



Usually I'll go to the BIOS and wait for it to go back to normal. Usually takes less than 10 minutes. When it is back to normal, black lines will be shown, example of the pic below.


I live beside the highway, so my place is kind of dusty at times. That caused my laptop heatsink to accumulate dust over time, and eventually my laptop start to have heat problem (auto shutdown) plus graphics problem. I downloaded this software called Core Temp, and to my horror, the temperature is always above 70*C, hitting more than 98*C while gaming, or even when running Restaurant City in Facebook!

Anyway, one day I managed to take out and clean the heat sink, cleared a thick layer of dust from it. After that laptop starts to run between 35-50*C and only hitting more than 60*C while on gaming. It fixed the overheat issue, but not the defect graphic chip, worse still, my screen get corrupted more! Now it get corrupted almost whenever I stop playing videos.

Last night it won't even went back to normal after the "cool down" period at the BIOS screen. This morning it's still showing the same problem, but for some reason it went back to normal after I left it in BIOS for some time. Yes, I've been living with the problem all these while, luckily I'd opt for 3 years warranty when I bought this computer. Probably time to send it for repair.