Black Screen Crashes

[XrayPunk]

Hello,
I've been banging my head against the wall for weeks trying to fix this. In the past month I've been getting black screen crashes, only while playing games. The games are WoW and SWToR. I've played WoW for almost three years on this laptop with no problems. There is no consistancy as to when this happens. I might play for 4 hours and it never happens, then 20 min into another session it happens. The screen goes black and the audio gets stuck in buzzing loop. I cannot do anything at that point, just have to hard restart. I've updated graphics driver, then rolled it back. Nothing. Temps are fine with nothing getting over 60C. I cleaned the heck outta the thing with a vacuum and canned air. Ran memtest86 with 3 passes. I did the benchmark test from 3Dmarkvantage to see if i could get it to crash. It passed that. Turned off screen saver, automatic updates and made sure my power settings were not causing the comp to sleep. I've dropped settings and resolutions in game to see if that helped. It didnt. I tried different outlets to plug into, thought maybe it was a power issue. That didnt help. . Any other thoughts or options would be great. Thanks

Laptop is a Gateway p-7805u
Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 / 2.26 GHz
4gb DDR3 SDRAM - 1066.0 MHz
NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit Edition

 

[Raiddinn]

Sounds like a driver problem, tbh.

If you play the game, if you can go to the same area and it crashes every time, it would definitely point to a driver issue.

If you crash some play, but you can go back to that same place other times and it works perfectly fine then maybe it isn't a driver issue.

It may also have to do with your physical location. Maybe you crash every 20 minutes at person A's house and you never crash at person B's house.

If you can narrow it down along those lines, that is a good start as to diagnosing the problem too.

In any event, if you have a driver CD or something from when you originally installed the graphics card, you might want to try using it. It is possible some new driver you installed since then is causing it to act up, especially if you installed a new driver 1 month ago when your problems started.

 

[XrayPunk]

Yeah there is really no rhyme or reason to the crashes. It all seems to be very random. And I don't play anywhere else execpt the office in my house.

 

[Raiddinn]

Try an older graphics driver than the one you are using if you can find one.

 

[XrayPunk]

Rolled back to an older one. That didnt work. Still had the crashes.

 

[Raiddinn]

Is that older than the oldest one you have been trying, or is that the same one that isn't the newest, but is the other one you have generally been using?

In case it isn't clear, I am talking old school. Like the oldest thing you can find for the card.

Also, try playing with the side of the case off and aim a desk fan at it, one of those big fat AC fans. One like this http://tinyurl.com/7shovxp

 

[Erik Vidmar]

Not realy a sloutin, but i too get the black screen crash but only in SWTOR and minecraft, WoW works fine with me and the crashes are all randome and then a black screen appears and the audio goes on for about 1 min and then goes silant :/