I desperately need help here. My laptop has crashed four times in the last couple days, like Blue Screen of Death and everything. What's happened is that first my screen goes completely black, then comes back, and I get a message saying that the display driver stopped responding and has recovered. This happens several times, then I get a BSOD saying that an attempt to restart the display driver and recover from a timeout has failed. Again, this has happened four times.
I have a registry cleaner and ran it after the second crash, didn't work. So far the crashes have all occurred while I was playing Sims 3. I uninstalled and reinstalled the Sims the day before this started. The only hardware change I've made recently is that the same day the problem started I started using a cooling pad which is plugged into the laptop by a USB cable. I tried playing games without the cooling pad plugged in and it happened again, so that's apparently not the problem.
Any thoughts? I'm a little hysterical because I can't afford a repair right now, let alone a new computer.