Video freezes, nvidia 8800GT, probable driver issue

Anonymous
2009-11-14T10:24:12+00:00

Looking at their forums, it should become apparent that nvidia does not care about problems their customers are having. Therefore, I have to turn to people they might listen to or work with to solve such problems - Windows and Microsoft.

I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Retail). My video card is a nVidia Geforce 8800 GT.

The issue is that the video is locking up, flickering, freezing, and even sometimes causing the "blue screen of death" - The problem is widely reported, and is also widely misdiagnosed as overheating. The card is not overheating, let me be quite clear on this. The card is also not old and ready to die (Another common misdiagnosis by techs who would brush difficult problems away.)

The issue is: Whatever nVidia has done with their drivers, they do not get along with Windows 7. The issue, if you search the web, is exclusively a Windows 7 problem.

I saw an article earlier regarding something that was implemented in Vista that would detect if the video drivers were crashing, and attempt to close and restart them without rebooting. I can not remember what this feature is called, nor can I find that info again (I found it while at work and did not save the URL sadly) - but it certainly seems like that's what is going on.  The video will flicker while I am in a game, the game will freeze, and then after a second, the screen will go black, then the game will come back up, but at lower graphic detail. Evenually, the game will do the same thing again, and go back to full detail.

That's just a theory, though, of course.

I have tried the latest nvidia drivers, as well as the drivers from Windows update. I have not yet tried the nvidia beta drivers, but have read from other users that there was no luck in using them.  Some users reported luck when using the default drivers of WIndows 7, or the Windows Update drivers, but I had no luck, and many others also didn't.  I may try rolling back to some much older Vista drivers to see what happens.

In any case, my purpose here was less to get an answer, and more to really just spread the word more about this problem. Maybe a Microsoft employee will see this post and report it to someone who can have their people talk to nvidia's people, so to speak, because nvidia people do not frequent their forums. There are threads there with issues unsolved from over 2 years ago, and those are similar to some other issues we still have today with TV-Out. But that's another topic entirely.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

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Anonymous
2009-11-24T01:00:16+00:00

Well, no problems so far beyond some flicker. The flicker does make me nervous, but otherwise, no crashes in almost 24 hours. I have been running Folding@Home on it constantly and it doesn't seem to have had any issues with that, either.  Folding@Home has it running at 97-98% GPU usage constantly, and it's sitting at 67 degrees Celsius, which is just fine. It is looking more and more like it was my 8800.

But I do still wonder what the ____ could have caused it to act so crazy, hmm...

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  1. Anonymous
    2010-02-14T20:18:15+00:00

    I have kinda the same problem with crashing, I get everything, the weird colors all over my screen, BSOD, even stripes when starting up.

    This is really frustrating, I tried a lot, all kind of drivers, i have the most current now.

    I think it happend to me when I installed Age Of Empires 3 (this is where it first happend), I already did a system recovery with no avail..

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-02-12T00:16:25+00:00

    I had the same issue.  Blue screens and just outright reboots/resets without even a blue screen.  I have a 8800GT using the driver 196.21_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit_english_whql.  I finally found the issue to be with the windows desktop graphics (of course, I blame Nvidia's drivers).

    The temporary solution is to disable all the advanced desktop features.   Go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Performance Information and Tools and select "Adjust Visual effects ".  Then select "Adjust for best performance " to disable them all.  Once I set this, I have not had a single crash since. BTW, the default desktop is kinda ugly after that, so I did have to go back and select the "Windows 7 Theme" but since all the accelerated features were disabled, I got a system that looks ok now and doesnt crash.  Lets hope for a fix.

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-01-24T18:21:39+00:00

    I have been dealing with Nvidia for a couple of weeks attempting to find a solution to my problem (posted earlier in month) Nothing proposed worked , eventually the Nvidia chap said that W7 was a very demanding OS and it was possible that one of my other apps was causing some sort of issue , so that was it. The only solution I have found is to go back and reload Windows XP professional , which works fine with no crashes no blue screens no lock ups that W7 produced . I intend switching to ATI for my graphics card as they seem to have sorted out the W7 problems

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  4. Anonymous
    2010-01-23T16:46:32+00:00

    I have a similar problem except I have an NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT on Vista. I have all the same problems on all my games. I tried most things I could think of, I even tried an entire system wipe. And still nothing works.It happens to all my games. I need answers Im going crazy without my computer!

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