Having a hell of a time refinding a working video driver...

[Baneblade]

Nvm, pulled my head out of my derriere.

EDIT 2:

Well I thought it was my mistake, but the driver that should be for my laptop and OS combination doesn't work at all. It comes from the laptop manufacturer.

[Baneblade]

If anyone has run into this and has an idea what might be wrong, what is basically happening is that the OS defaults to the Standard VGA driver. Both XP and Windows 7 are doing this. Complete wipes and reinstalls don't seem to do any good toward fixing the problem.

However Friday morning I booted and all of a sudden the laptop installs the drivers it should have been using all along and works the way it should have been until today. Now it reverted back to the Standard VGA driver and does exactly what it did before including rejecting the appropriate drivers.

I've opened the laptop and can see no visible cause for this. This model isn't known to have this problem. My best guess is that the hardware is failing internally at some level, but not in a way that makes for an easy diagnosis.

[Rbstr]

Your going to need to give some technical details. Make, model, you're dual booting? Are these drivers from the manufacturer of the computer or the card specifically.

[Baneblade]

MSI EX623, manufacturer drivers. I'm not dual booting.

I pressure cleaned the fan and heatsink assembly and the idle temps dropped 25 C, so I'm guessing it had a blockage. But the original problem has not yet been remedied.

AIDA detects the card as a 9500M, but Windows still does not.

[Rbstr]

Dropped 25C? What was it idling at before?!

If it's a hardware failure you may or may not be able to see it, but I'd expect it to work worse than it is. Like no video at all level.

It may be toast...you need to give MSI a call/email and see where it goes.

[Baneblade]

The Cores were idling at 90+ C. No overclocking, all stock OEM Intel.

Which is insane because there was no obvious symptoms until I reinstalled XP the first time. A careful examination of the interior didn't turn up anything unusual that would explain it. And a 125 psi air blast through the heat sink and fan assembly (ducted to the CPU, GPU, and BUS) only resulted in a token amount of dust. So I either missed what was causing it or dust is even more evil than I remember.

The Cores idle down around 55 C now. Which still seems on the high side for sub 5% CPU use.

Anyway, other than a battery death kill, this is the only thing I've ever had go wrong with it in almost five years of abusing it.

[Rbstr]

You're not going to be able to see burnt out transistors on a chip or, far more likely, thermally stressed BGA solder.
90C+ is getting to the point where you can start screwing things up with the packaging. Lead-less solder especially.

But, you seem to be talking about the CPU? The GPU should be a separate chip/board from that.

[Baneblade]

I can't get temp readings from the GPU for some reason.