Display driver stopped responding and has recovered

[pinkobraino]

Hi Experts,

I'm submitting this enquiry out of pure desperation because I have completely run out of ideas. So, this will be my last attempt before turning my PC into a glorified door stopper.

I have 3 PC's. Two have win7 home premium installed. The 3rd is a 6 year old machine with WinXP Pro. The three are wired networked via a 100mbit hub. This is a pretty basic setup. The problem was that getting the network sharing going between XP and Win7 was a nightmare, so I decided to install Win7 on the XP machine. Now network shares works perfectly with no problem. However, after installing win7 on the old WinXP box I noticed that every few minutes the machine would hang for a few seconds, and a message would appear at the bottom of the screen saying “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered … ” After searching this error message, I found an article that describes a solution but it does not work http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946

Neither does any of the many other solutions such as changing the video card, latest video drivers, increasing CPU voltages, chipset voltages etc. It seems the problem manifests when u do any task that is related to video/hardware acceleration such as gaming, viewing HD video, benchmarking etc. The interesting thing is that the machine is absolutely stable in WinXP but not in Win7. The other interesting fact is that if I remove the video drivers with Driver Sweeper, and install the Standard VGA adapter as the driver, then the machine is stable in Win7 except that there is no video acceleration etc.

The machine specs are as follows … please don’t laugh ‘cos I only use it for MS office, web browsing, watching network movies using XBMC and playing Pacman using MAME emulator

CPU: AMD X2 dual core 3800+
Memory: 3gig DDR400
Video card: Powercolor ATI HD 4850 1gig
Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
Hard drive: Western Digital 1TB RE4 drive (WD1003FBYX)
Soundcard: SoundBlaster Live 24

PS… I swapped in my old Nvidia 7800GTX … cleaned drivers etc … but same problem only in Win7. WinXP is stable.

Has anyone else had the same issue where a machine is stable in WinXP but not in Win7 ?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.
-Pinky

 

[Lefturn]

Have you considered doing a complete reinstall of Windows 7? If you did an upgrade installation, try a clean installation instead. Upgrade installs have been notorious for causing issues in the past.

 

[ram1009]

I'm sorry to say but this is typical of what I always say about AMD/ATI drivers. They are buggy. Try an Nvidia GPU.

 

[AvatarX_66]

I was having the same problem on my Win 7 x64 system (Core i7 960, GeForce GTX 560Ti). Updating the GeForce driver appears to have fixed my problem ... going 1 week with no errors so far. I was getting them several times a day before.

Problem seems to have appeared with the v28x drivers (eg. v285.62). I upgraded to v290.53 beta and all seems good. Others seem to report v275.33 drivers are good. But it is an older driver and may not work with the latest games.

Good luck!

-AvatarX

Hi Experts,

I'm submitting this enquiry out of pure desperation because I have completely run out of ideas. So, this will be my last attempt before turning my PC into a glorified door stopper.

I have 3 PC's. Two have win7 home premium installed. The 3rd is a 6 year old machine with WinXP Pro. The three are wired networked via a 100mbit hub. This is a pretty basic setup. The problem was that getting the network sharing going between XP and Win7 was a nightmare, so I decided to install Win7 on the XP machine. Now network shares works perfectly with no problem. However, after installing win7 on the old WinXP box I noticed that every few minutes the machine would hang for a few seconds, and a message would appear at the bottom of the screen saying “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered … ” After searching this error message, I found an article that describes a solution but it does not work http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946

Neither does any of the many other solutions such as changing the video card, latest video drivers, increasing CPU voltages, chipset voltages etc. It seems the problem manifests when u do any task that is related to video/hardware acceleration such as gaming, viewing HD video, benchmarking etc. The interesting thing is that the machine is absolutely stable in WinXP but not in Win7. The other interesting fact is that if I remove the video drivers with Driver Sweeper, and install the Standard VGA adapter as the driver, then the machine is stable in Win7 except that there is no video acceleration etc.

The machine specs are as follows … please don’t laugh ‘cos I only use it for MS office, web browsing, watching network movies using XBMC and playing Pacman using MAME emulator

CPU: AMD X2 dual core 3800+
Memory: 3gig DDR400
Video card: Powercolor ATI HD 4850 1gig
Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
Hard drive: Western Digital 1TB RE4 drive (WD1003FBYX)
Soundcard: SoundBlaster Live 24

PS… I swapped in my old Nvidia 7800GTX … cleaned drivers etc … but same problem only in Win7. WinXP is stable.

Has anyone else had the same issue where a machine is stable in WinXP but not in Win7 ?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.
-Pinky

 

[Amphoteric]

I had this exact same problem in Windows 7 with a 560 Ti and AMD card. All good in Vista, upgraded to 7 and BAM! random display driver issues (stopped responding and restarting display driver message in taskbar) no matter what program I was running. Insanely random, too, like just surfing the web after 60 seconds or 20 minutes into a gaming session. No heat issues, multiple cards used from both AMD and nVidia.

ONLY after I flashed my video card BIOS (EVGA/nVidia) did it stop. It makes no sense, but it worked. I have not flashed my AMD card since the problem resolved (it is a slower card) and I have no desire to "jinx" a working set-up.

For what it's worth...

 

[pinkobraino]

Have you considered doing a complete reinstall of Windows 7? If you did an upgrade installation, try a clean installation instead. Upgrade installs have been notorious for causing issues in the past.

Hi,

I reformatted the hard drive and made a clean install of Win7. I also tried various versions such as the Home Premium and Professional. I then tried both 32 and 64 bit versions even though only 3gig ram is installed. None of this solved the problem either

 

[pinkobraino]

I'm sorry to say but this is typical of what I always say about AMD/ATI drivers. They are buggy. Try an Nvidia GPU.

Hi,

I uninstalled the ATI drivers and cleaned everything out in Safe mode using Driver Sweeper. Then installed the many versions of the catalyst drivers but did not solve anything.

I then repeated the same process usinf an Nvidia 7800GTX but still same problem. *SIGH* this is soooo frustrating.

Thanks,
Pinky