Screen freeze, re-boot to pixelated screen - help?

[Yeslek2000]

Apologies if this has already been covered but I did a few searches and couldn't find anything.

My problem is that after normal usage and shut down about 2 days ago, followed by a normal start up yesterday, my screen started freezing. The usual screen blackout had come on (power saver) after a few mins but when I tried to wake it I got no response. The battery was at least half charged jut before the blackout and the laptop was connected to mains power also. I had to force a restart by holding the on button until it shut down - I hate having to so this.

Now it barely boots up before crashing, each time forcing me to force restart. Only this morning it restarted itself after crashing.

I'm running a 3 yr old 2.4ghz MacBook pro, 2gb ram, on snow leopard.

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.

Ps my apple aftercare ran out in march.

 

[ezramoore]

You may be experiencing issues related to your GPU.

Check to see if you are potentially covered under this (http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377) extended coverage program. Then take your machine to an Apple Authorized Service Provider or Apple store (if you have one locally) and ask them to run the tests required to verify it.