Screen Flickering and Freezing on Sony Vaio VGN-CR13G

[laptoplinux]

Hi,

The graphics card on my laptop keeps doing some really weird stuff, like while using it, it will constantly flicker, and occasionally crash. It started doing this about two weeks ago, where it stopped working, slowly the image on the screen drained away and was replaced with a series of stripes, in the other two occasions, it was the same leading up to the freeze, but this time it faded into a greyish green. In both things one thing is common, there was no control during the freeze. Also after each event the system boots normally with no problem.

I think it might have something to do with my graphics support, as in programs such as celestia, if a texture is larger than a certian size, then most of the time the texture will not be displayed, instead the atmosphere will be there but the planet will not.

Oh, BTW I use GNU/Linux, so if anyone was wondering "Why didn't you download the drivers from the website?", there is no such driver for linux. I did contact my local sony, they said that such a driver didn't exist, and when I asked if I could have the source code for the Windows one (So I could attempt a port to linux), they refused. There is no sort of offical support for my card in GNU/Linux. ...The screen is flickering now while I'm typing, the flickering is very mild.

OS: MartOS 13 RC4 (A fork of Lubuntu 12.10 I made.)

HDD: 60GB Agility 3 SSD

Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X2300 (AMD)
CPU: Core 2 Duo T5750 @ 2GHz (Modes are 1GHz, 1.33GHz, 1.66GHz and 2.00GHz)

Ram: 3GB DDR2 @ 800MHz (The 2GB is a brand new, top of the line model, and the other is a stick that I think was already in the machine.)

Temps:

Between 30-80 Celsius without a cooling stand

Between 30-66 Celsius with a cooling stand.

If I halve the clockspeed to a 1GHz Dual core, then I can achive a temp of 40 Celsius under load.

Does anyone have any ideas on what this is? Is it a software issue or a Hardware issue? (Possibly the GPU?)