BSOD playing games(UT3, Tribes:Ascend etc) Graphics or hardware issue?

Hi,

These are the system spec for my Alienware M15x, just to check
-Windows 7 x64 Home Premium (Preinstalled, but has been reinstalled around 8 months ago). The hardware is around 2 years old now
-nVidia GeForce GTX 260M
-Intel i7 Q 740 1.73 GHz Octacore
-4.00 GB RAM

The issue I have is that whenever I start a game, such as Unreal Tournament 3 or Tribes: Ascend the game launches fine, however 5-10 minutes into a game, the display crashes and freezes. This happens almost 100% of the time, on other occasions I can play the game peacefully but this is very rare.
From time to time, the computer gets a BSOD, and I have attatched the dump files to this post.

I have checked and now am certain that I have the latest graphics driver for my graphics card, and I have also recently installed the latest version of Microsoft Visual C++ and Framework 4.0

The question I have regarding this issue is:
1. What kind of issue am I having?
2. What is causing the issue to begin with?
3. Whether or not there a way to fix this issue, and if so how?

I would really appreciate your help, I hope that somebody could help me out with this as quick as possible!
Thank you for your assitance in advance :)

HonorGamer said:

It looks like your NVIDIA drivers are out of date. Go ahead and update those here: Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers

Like I said, I am certain I have the latest driver
But I went over to the site and checked once again, and used the automatic detection option, and I do in fact have the 301.42 version of the driver for 64-bit which they say is the latest version. Or are you trying to say I need to install the 32-bit version?

No problem :)
I have tried doing clean installs of the graphics driver several times, by uninstalling, restarting the computer, and installing the latest graphics driver (which I currently have) and finally rebooting the laptop once the install had finnished.

The issue had still persisted even after the reinstallation of the driver.

I'd say the crashes/freezes started 12-14 months ago. It was the reason why I tried reinstalling Windows 7. But as you can probably tell, even a full reinstall of the OS didn't do much to solve the problem.

I remember there being a few occasions where it happened when I was just simply using the laptop with several programs open, but that was only once or twice.
So yes, its mainly when I play games

So any idea whats causing all this?

I tried playing a couple of games again today, caused the computer to crash though, no bluescreens this time around. The computer freezes and the display locks, the computer is unresponsive to any input from keyboard or mouse...
One thing I noticed is that if I have a music track playing in the background in iTunes the track continues to play even when the crash occurs, but doesn't move onto the next track. So I guess the computer doesnt COMPLETELY crash...

Anyway, I really appreciate your help over here, thank you.