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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.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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...
i'm having the same issues. I had no issues with my card until yesterday. I played l4d2, l4d, tf2, cod4 with no issues up until nov. 17th. now i can't run any game without the nvidia drivers crashing.
in fact, JUST TYPING THIS REPLY HAS CAUSED MY DRIVER TO CRASH.
Hardly think its an OS issue as many seems to say... , neither an hardware issue.
Its rather an Driver issue from Nvidias side , how can i say so ? :
This is the case for my 9800GX2 card. And i dont have an MSI motherboard , mine is from ASUS. ( P5K ).
So after 30 minutes +- 15min i get a black screen and the pc dont do a **** , and once i got a frozzen screen with my game showing up but that might have been cuz i played it in window mode to try if that helped...
You haven't done clean-boot troubleshooting and you have all that stuff running?!!! I thought you had exhausted every possibility! Come back after you've done that very important and basic troubleshooting step. Troubleshooting must be done systematically or your results will be flawed. Things that could be causing your problem:
Java (there is no need for a Java service to run).
Steam can be problematic but we run it here with no problem. If you aren't playing a Steam game, turn it off.
Nvidia Driver Helper Service
uTorrent
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
Zune Network Sharing Service
Curse Client
Mumble or Ventrilo (I know for a fact that Ventrilo can be buggy; am not personally familiar w/Mumble)
iTunes while playing demanding games
But don't just turn these off arbitrarily. Do realtroubleshooting instead. If clean-boot doesn't help, then at least you will have actual facts instead of conjecture.
How to perform a clean boot in Windows Vista or Windows 7 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135
MS-MVP - Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!
Hi Garylisk:
Please check your BIOS. MSI can live auto-update online your BIOS/Drivers/ Utility/Firmware directly.
