It's begun. NVIDIA has finally begun accepting claims in the class-action settlement from late last year regarding defective laptop GPUs. The issue affected a number of Dell, HP, and Apple laptops, and spread across what can only be called a huge number of different models. The statement NVIDIA made on July 2nd, 2008 admitted the issue, and that the company was taking a $150 - $200 million charge to cover:

... anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems. All newly manufactured products and all products currently shipping in volume have a different and more robust material set.

Among the symptoms exhibited by affected systems were:

• Distorted or scrambled video on the notebook computer screen
• No video on the notebook computer screen even when the notebook computer is on
• Random characters, lines or garbled images on the notebook computer screen

The settlement has been approved by a California court, and the company began accepting claims on Jan. 13 for repairs, replacements or reimbursements at a dedicated website (linked below). The deadline for submissions is March 14th.