Recently I re-installed Windows 7 home premium on my Dell Inspiron N5010 Laptop. After booting in, I installed the AMD ATI Mobility Radeon 5470 driver. When I rebooted my computer I got BSOD with code 0x0116 and a reference to atikmpag.sys. So, then I logged in Safe mode and rolled back the driver to Standard VGA Graphics Adapter and then I was able to log back in normal mode.
The above phenomenon is not a one time thing as I have tried installing the driver 3 more times and each time, it gives me the same result.
I read somewhere that this problem may happen if the Video card has gone bad. So, I ran Dell diagnostics from the boot up menu. Though technically, the tests got passed but during the video test, color bars were displayed which had dots on them(like the picture below):-
Also, if I try to log into Ubuntu(which is also on my laptop), the whole display gets messed up(like the picture below):-
Note- The pictures were picked from the internet but what I see in my laptop is exactly the same.
So, I think that my video card is going bad. My questions are:-
If my card is bad, how was I able to log back into Windows after rolling back my driver to Standard VGA and got no error. As far as I know(and I can be wrong in this) the video card is supposed to render whatever we see on the screen. When, I logged in after rolling back the driver, my icons and screens are of disproportionate size (like they are when you have no video driver) and lack the sharpness you get after the driver is installed. Is CPU taking care of the display?
My Video card is integrated with the motherboard. I read somewhere that I can install another graphics card in PCIe slot and in BIOS do some setting to ignore the onboard card. Is this possible for my laptop?
Any other options that I can explore?
Thanks in advance.