Nvidia Display Driver Error

[sdsinc]

I'm having an issue with my laptop - a few stats first. Lenovo ThinkPad W701, 12GB ram with i7 Vpro chip. Nvidia Quadro 2800FX with 1GB on chip memory and 3GB shared system memory.

Now the history - Driver version is 8.17.12.6824. I had upgraded the driver from Nvidia last month. Shortly after, I was experiencing the program pausing, a set of screen flickers, and then a balloon in the lower right that stated "Display driver stopped working but has recovered" and it gave me a specific "location" number of 286.24 or something like that. It was happening with regularity and only in Chief, although to be fair I use the machine for chief 99% of the time.

So I research and find others having this error (albeit mostly from gamers) and I decide to roll back the driver to the prior version. A full day goes by with no trouble and then yesterday I not only get the pause and flicker, but the dreaded blue screen and restart. The bluescreen describes the problem as a display driver error but, in true windows fashion, offers no useful information.

There was a time when I would toil and figure this out, but with "maturity" comes maturities sidekick - impatience. I cannot think of anything to do but curse, perform some rudimentary percussive maintenance, and walk away from the machine. My brain tells me this has something to do with the graphic intensity of the software and a glitch with the 14.2 update (I never experienced this problem before the 14.2 update).

Any thoughts would be appreciated. This is a bit of a progress killer.

Rich

[perryh]

I would go to Nvidia website an look for a newer driver and install, if you already haven't done that. You should completely delete the previous driver, then install the new one, or the old one. They recommend doing that on their website. I have all the latest drivers with no problem but laptops might have different drivers. I use the beta drivers and haven't had any problems doing it.

[David J. Potter]

Make sure, especially if you use a mouse or track ball with your laptop, that its drivers are up to date.

The two biggest sources of problems I have ever had using Chief came from software drivers, either mouse/track-ball or video card.

I have seen crashes caused by mouse drivers a lot more than video card drivers over the years.

DJP

[sdsinc]

So it turns out it was the driver. I had to completely remove the driver including using Driver Sweeper to kill all remnants of anything related to it on the machine. This brought me back to a basic video driver with no Nvidia drivers installed or resident. I then re-installed the driver from Lenovo's website instead of the Nvidia driver package from them.

Im sharing this for two reasons. First, I had to contact Nvidia tech support directly. Not only did i speak to a real person, but they were quite helpful and followed up with me via email two days later to see if the problem was resolved. Nvidia fan for life now. Second, it was Nvidia who told me that they recommend using the driver provided by the laptop manufacturer and NOT the latest drivers on the Nvidia website. I find this logical but interesting, as we always read on this forum about using the latest drivers which in this case did not work out. Hmmm.

[Doug Park]

Blue screens can also be the result of overheating. I had a Toshiba laptop with nvidia graphics that would start blue screening because of heat build up. Blowing the dust out of the graphics card always fixed it up.

Blue screens can also be a sign of hardware failure. I've seen graphic cards that started having flaky behavior that had clearly failed because there were visibly popped capacitors on the board yet they still worked part of the time.

I'm glad it was only a driver issue.

[perryh]

Yes vacuum all the vents from dust also, dust gets on the fan blades and slows down the fan, so overheating will happen.

[thorn]

I am glad this issue was resolved for you. I had the same problem after installing Window 7.
Unfortunately for me, the only way I could avoid the problem was to go back to XP. I spent many, many hours researching the problem, installing & uninstalling drivers, removing hardware & software.
It happened mostly when using a different cad program, so I basically had my system down to hard drive, memory, video and one program.
This was when Win 7 first came out. When you goggle it, you see it's a problem that's been around since Vista, with literally hundreds of threads relating to the error. There are also several fixes to try, but some only seem to work for some people. I tried everything……..I still check every so often to see if the problem has been permanently resolved……as yet no

[Gary Doski]

It used to be nvidia was the card for Chief with ati /amd having the problems, but now it is reversed and nvidia is having problems (according to Chief tech).

[sdsinc]

you should install windows 7

Windows 7 64 bit pro is the op system

So far, almost a week in, I have had no further issues since the re-install. Thanks for the info on overheating - the laptop is new but I will make certain to keep it clean.

[designersink]

Ever since purchasing my desktop computer with two NVIDIA 1 GB video cards, I have found they work great with Chief until I try to update the drivers. There have been 3 or 4 updates since I bought my computer, and each time a new driver update comes out, I have tried to update. Each time, my screen goes to black and it locks up my computer as soon as I go into a rendering mode and attempt to move the camera. I roll back the driver to the original version, and it seems to work fine. Once, when I updated the driver, it turned all of my paint colors a light blue color for some reason. Again, I rolled back the driver and it worked fine. I figure I will just keep the driver I have and not worry about updating in the future.

[Gary Doski]

and yeah gary doski Nvidia is a graphic card producing company .. and its compatible to amd and intel ..

yeah, I know, I own both.