My laptop is five years old and I know it is probably obsolete. It is a Dell Latitude C840 (whatever that is) has a pentium 4 processor and windows xp. internal cd/dvd player etc. my work gave it to me. anyway - after all of this time i am having trouble with it. i don't recall how much room it has in the hard drive, but i know for a fact that about 80% of the space is free.

lately, when i turn it on, the monitor freaks out and goes all pastel colours and then blacks out and then on again every few seconds. the computer will not respond to anything i try to do except hard booting.  sometimes for i don't know why, it seems to send it self into "safe mode" and all of the print and pics get very very large and gray and white. sometimes if i restart, it does restart ok and is normal and runs well if a little slow. out of sheer desperation, i went to the Nvidia website which directed me to the Dell website and i downloaded every graphics and motherboard driver my computer would let me do. this seems to have helped a bit, however, my computer still is not working as it was before this happened.

is my computer toast? any advice is welcome and appreciated.