Vostro 1510 w/8400M GS- Defective?

Hi everyone,
A while ago(about a month and a half),I was viewing some youtube videos on my Vostro,when the battery ran out and it turned off automatically.When I turned it back on,the whole screen was corrupted(streaks of colurs and stuff),even in the BIOS loading screen,but the computer would still boot(the windows start-up sound would play after a while).One of my friends checked the laptop and the contents of the hard drive and said that a virus had caused a massive load on the gpu which had then failed.I then sent it over to DELL,and they said the motherboard needed to be replaced because the graphics card had failed.But, I couldn't afford to get the motherboard replaced,so I decided to keep it and hope it would start working again.I heard that sometimes,heating a laptop with one of these "defective" chips would cause it to start working again for around 6 months,so I did that(not the way it's supposed to be done,I think ),and the laptop started working again.To be on the safe side,I took out the hard drive and replaced it with a formatted drive of one of my older laptops,and installed windows 7 ultimate 64-bit on it.For some reason,it was running "standard non-VGA drivers",and when I left it on for some time,the yellow streaks returned but the laptop still worked.When I tried to increase the resolution the laptop crashed again,so I had to do the 'heating-up' trick again.Now,whenever I run something moderately intensive,say Zune or IE9,it doesn't crash,but when I run something like Batman : Arkham Asylum,even at the lowest setting,it crashes within 5 minutes.But for some reason,when I unplug the heatsink fan,it runs perfectly,except the CPU throttles itself because it gets too hot.I even tried running FurMark for 10 mins,after which the laptop overheated and turned off,but it had no errors or artifacts.Also,when I opened the laptop,I cleaned out the fans,and elevated the laptop,and arkham asylum would work for a little longer.The last time it froze,I removed the heatsink and heated the GPU with a hair-dryer for good measure(because I wasn't sure I was doing it properly previously).I haven't tried playing any games after that,but it seems to be more stable.I have also ordered a CoolerMaster Notepal E1,which should be arriving in around 2-3 days.So,is there any permanent or longer-lasting fix for this problem apart from replacing the motherboard?Would this problem be fixed by the additional cooling?And would running the laptop without the heatsink fan for short periods of time cause any serious damage?Thanks

 

Practically, there is no permanent fix to the Nvidia GPU problem.

Sometimes it can last a while after you reflow it, but it's almost certainly going to break again. In theory you could reball it, and that should be a permanent fix, but I'm assuming you wouldn't be asking if you had the tools to do that.

tl; dr, save up for a new laptop.

 

Vostro 1510 has a soldered 8400M GS. As Commander Wolf stated, I would save up for a new laptop as it would easily outclass a Vostro 1510 these days.

 

Yeah,that's what I thought too.But I think it's gonna be a while till I get a new laptop(atleast 2-3 months),and till then,I need a temporary fix.But,does it take longer for the problem to occur if the cooling is improved?Because I read somewhere that this problem does not occur if the temperatures can be kept consistent,and would I have caused any damage in the short periods of time I ran the laptop without the main fan connected?