My 15 month old HP Pavilion ZD8000 laptop died on me a couple of days ago. The graphics card cooling fan failed and the graphics hardware overheated. Lots of funky coloured lines and appeared on my screen with all sorts of corruption, and any attempt to switch to 3D graphics results in the laptop freezing totally. Much to my chagrin the system is out of warranty, so I'm going to replace it.I want to keep the cost below

That's a bit tragic. Have you contacted HP anyway? I know the laptop is out of warranty, but after such a short time, could they not at least be shamed into repairing the thing at cost? It'd be worth a letter..M.