oh crap. please help!

i have a 4002 ferarri and well its had better days.
in the beginning of october it started having problems starting up. it would turn on but it didnt seem to talk to talk to anything inorder to get the boot booting. i knew this was not good and reported it to acer but school had started and papers take priority over dealing with the lappy. once it was booted it was fine too so it wasnt like it was really unstable.
fast forward to last night...
im watching an episode of stargate atlantis, and to my frustration i get what i would call artifacts happening. they were little random horizontal lines that went everywhere. as soon as this started media player crashed. it did a little bluescreen and then just died. i "reported" the problem and the artifacting went away as soon as media player was gone. i decided this would be a good time to back up all my final papers but before i could do anything about that, the artifacting returned with a vengence. everything seemed to grind to a halt and i pretty much started to panic.
it then blackscreened but continued to run fairly hot, but it didnt actually sound like it was accomplishing anything, other than creating ample heat. i decided to shut it down, since a blackscreen wasnt gonna accoplish anything, but i tried to turn on/off both wireless and bluetooth, since i could actually see the status of these things. it appeared to be frozen since pressing the buttons did nothing, bluetooth stayed off, wifi stayed on.
i left it off for about 2 hours and decided to try again (i have 4 final papers on it, all due next week). i got it started, but it blanked the pacman screenm which i thought was bad. it seemed to take longer to start, but it did start. it pretty much instantly artifacted like crazy and froze.
so i let it sit for 4 hours. this time it started up pretty normally, i got my files onto a thumbdrive. it was artifacting, but i also decided that this was most likely a videocard problem so i killed the drivers for the videocard.

is that what my problem is? my vc has offed itself? i checked the ram, its good. but without another identical laptop its not the easiest thing to troubleshoot. and since i cant physically see anything i cant tell you that theres a smokin hole in the videocard, tho there never has been any smoke emitted by this lappy.

thanks!
matt

 

Maybe see if there are new video card drivers that you can get? A computer of mine one day, after functioning for a year or two with no problems, randomly started having artifacts that were like dots. If I rebooted, they would go away, but then it took less and less time between reboots until it began dotting the whole screen and... Long story short, got new drivers, and it's worked beautifully ever since. Come to think of it, I don't think it had any drivers other than whatever Windows comes with. It was a Dell desktop with Nvidia 5400 I believe, but with that said, getting new drivers is worth a try if you can...

Malia