Your laptop's Nvidia graphics card: Busted.

If your laptop has an "older" graphics chip from Nvidia, be prepared for the screen to possibly go dark without notice. Nvidia is warning consumers (and Wall Street) that a flaw in some of its chips will lead to a monstrous charge of up to $200 million to repair laptops that croak. The company has also said it will be releasing a driver for affected systems that will keep your fan running longer in order to prevent chips from overheating, but a timeline for the driver has not been announced.

The actual flaw hasn't been revealed because Nvidia says it isn't sure yet what it is. All that's been revealed so far is that the issue "relates to a packaging material used with some of its chips, as well as the thermal design of some laptops." Nvidia hasn't announced yet which products are at risk of failure.

Other chipmakers may be gloating over Nvidia's misstep, but history reminds us that all big tech companies have faced similar problems at some point. Intel has recalled chips more times than I can count, the most notorious of which was in 1994, when a flaw in the original Pentium caused Intel to recall the CPUs at a price of about $500 million. Sony's laptop battery recall from 2006 cost at least $400 million. And Microsoft potentially holds the record with its Xbox 360 repair fund, which will ultimately cost the company over $1 billion. By comparison, Nvidia is getting off easy.

Unfortunately there aren't any more details to report at this time. When Nvidia announces the identity of the problem laptops (and offers more information on these driver updates), I'll blog about it and offer download links as they become available. Stay tuned.

READ MORE: Nvidia's Q2 business update press release