Laptop turns off after a few minutes / glitched video

[{{909}}]

Bro in law dropped off his 'old' laptop, a 2012 Acer 5750G for me to look at complaining that it turns off after an hour. I guessed it was over heating as the summer is intense at the moment here but after looking at it, it seems more severe.

First of all, it switched itself off after only a few minutes, after rebooting seemed to load up again but when it came to loading windows, I was presented with a black screen of glitched graphics, which when I mentioned this to the BIL, he said that happens when you touch it on the right side.

I know very little about laptops, other than they're expansive and they break, so any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Looking at the exterior of the machine, its almost imaculate and I can see any heatsinks that are visible through the vents look almost dust free.

[evilsatan]

I believe you have integrated graphics and the Nvidia 540m so can you enter bios and find the display/graphics setting and try setting it to integrated rather than discreet? Sounds like the graphics chip is having a problem, possibly the solder joints. Usually integrated graphics are more reliable. If there are more than two settings then also try the third option and see if any help.

[riget]

Could be the lcd or cable, try to disconnect the cable to the mobo and use an external monitor,
They can look clean from the outside but can still be blocked on the inside, you usually have to open the laptop to get to the hs/fan.

[Over Carl]

Sometimes I've found on laptops with bad nVidia gfx chips, if I uninstall the the gfx driver and let it run in a basic mode using the windows default driver, sometimes they barely crash and suddenly become usable but with degraded graphics capabilities.

[TotallyRandom]

Power on tap F8

on options tick Enable VGA mode - will boot normally without any GFX drivers loaded
Add remove programs and remove all GFX drivers and download and reinstall them

Or just boot tap F10 and reinstall windows via its recovery partition

[{{909}}]

Formatted today and reinstalled 7 on it, original OS was Chinese anyway so if it came to windows tweaks I was boned. Reseated the hdd and ram, just for the sake of it too.

Seems to be ok for the last few hours, running the stock drivers for everything.