Graphics card failure.

Ahh, this has really been pissing me off for the past weeks. I have a:

Sony Vaio VGN-SZ760N
OS Windows 7 Professional (was Vista Home Premium i think x[)
2.40GHz Dual Core
NVIDIA Geforce 8400M GS
Mobile Intel Graphics Accelerator x1300

A couple weeks ago my display would blink and freeze, the the display would turn off for about 3 seconds, then come back on, and I would get a message saying "Your graphics card has failed and was successfully recovered (or something like that)." It would sometimes do it just once, then it never occured for a while, or it would keep doing so for a while, and I would have to wait for it to go through the cycle like 7 times before I regained control. It usually happened whenever I plugged or unplugged it from the AC adapter. Well I turned my computer on one day, and I saw that Aero wasn't on, so I tried to re enable it. Eh, didnt work. Troubleshoot said its not supported. ??? I cant play any games like I would either, "GS failed to open", also, I can't change the screen brightness anymore, its set to full brightness all the time, I didnt know graphics had an effect on that.

Im pretty sure drivers are up to date, it was working before, they cant just be deleted like on their own.

I upgraded to Windows 7 around 5 months or so ago , so I'm pretty sure thats not the problem.
My laptop was dropped like 3 weeks before this all happened.
I did do a system restore due to some antivirus soft pro thing that infected my computer around 2 weeks ago, but I'm not sure if that was before or after my graphics complete failure, so thats not much there...
Laptop makes noise sometimes, like if I have it in a certain position.
It overheats excessively too.

If anyone could help, I'd be damn grateful, if ya need anymore info, I'll be checking this page every minute till I fall asleep lolol

If there's anything, it's most likely the heat that's doing away with your notebook. If you are willing, go out, buy a can of compressed air, open up your laptop, and clean it out. There's probably a dust bunny in there that's jamming the fan (it's happened to me once). Then try again. If that's not the case, odds are your drops probably damaged a heatsink or something of the like, so look into that too when you open it up.
However, it's probably a dust/debris thing, and compressed air should do the trick. :)

Alright! Time to go find a screw driver small enough now -_-

when you dropped it and got lucky, ur gonna have to get only a new graphics card... mine died 9 months ago (buried in flowebed ) and had the same effects (blinking black, no aero, and ofc pixels flew around my screen)

IF you end up needing a motherboard leave me a message, they can be found used and in working condition w/o CPU for under $50

Dropped and viruses, if nothing else works, I'd wipe and drop that poor guy.
(this drop means fresh Windows install just to be crystal clear)
Laptops are packed so tight, could be a short caused by trauma in many places that comes and goes too.
I'd look at all fans on the laptop, q-tips in hand.... it's all suspect at this point!:
PSU, cables, pins, battery, slots, etc etc.

Just spill coffee all over it, for the triple threat. It's OK to admit if that happened too.

You are a lucky it survived the drop, you can yank that hard drive out and back it up rather easily, I saved my neighbor's OLD laptop data, 2 years of family photos and videos, device is under $20, it's a USB device.
See one here:
Amazon.com: Sabrent USB-DSC5 Serial ATA or IDE 2.5-/3.5-Inch to USB 2.0 Cable Converter Adapter…

I have the same notebook. Also had windows 7 when I started getting the same video card problems! Now I can't run it with the Nvidia card. Have to run it on the intel graphics card. I am now running vista again but cannot use the nvidia graphics card at all.

Sony were completely useless and could not help...

By the way my notebook has never been dropped!