NVIDIA Display Settings not available!!

So I bought an Alienware M17x R4 (Refurbished) 2 years ago and for the past year and a half it was doing well it had a year warranty which ran out on December 2013. As soon as that ran out everything went downhill, it got very slow so I restored it back to its factory settings which made everything worse as now the Nvidia graphics card wasn't even detectable when I went to the control panel I got an error saying the display settings weren't available, I searched and tried many different solutions none worked.... So in hope of solving this painful error I sent it to a computer specialist to fix for £40 which couldn't seem to fix it either. This is what he said ''i first cleaned the machine and and got the fresh drivers, no go ! next port of call then was to stress test the machine and diagnostics. the discrete nvidea card is not detected in bios. reflashed bios...no go...I then respawned the pc after taking a backup, wouldn't load nvidea drivers because the card still not detected. i then modded fresh drivers and tried a safe mode install... no go. I then did a full hardware test and only one card is detected the on board intel so I updated the chipset wireless and onboard video... then tried an install for the nvidea still no go... the card is dead.. updated and installed avg and updated pc.. the pc is totally usable till you upgrade however..'' It's a shame that after the warranty ran out I started getting horrible problems which according to the specialist I now need to purchase a new graphics card and the hole operation is going to cost £100. Before I go ahead I would like to see if there is any solution to this problem without me having to invest even more money into this so called ''Best Gaming Laptop''. Any help would be good as I have wasted the past 2 weeks catering to this Laptop's every need, and also even though I don't have a warranty anymore it would still be nice to have some sort of feedback on the problem.