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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 have a MSI 8800gt oc in Win32bit system and i've had this similar problem for over a year since u bought my rig. I've played non-STEAM games like AA3, WoW, Lotro, Fallout3 all causing the same "Your driver has stopped working.." jumping into desktop during games and freezing the screen. The only thing that has had an effect on not crashin is to raise my gpu fan speed over 85%.
None of the driver updates have worked, neither has vista service packs. So im sure this is a hardware issue on my part.
Today i tried to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R shadow of chernobyl and it was totally unplayable, cuz it started freezing right at the start of the game. Even my gpu fan speed at 100% it couldnt handle it.
Games that can be played with fan speed 85%: LoL,DAO,Cod4,WoW,Left4dead,Left4dead2
Games that are unplayable even fan speed 100%: STALKER, Borderlands
And yes ive tried lowering video settings in these games to a minimum.
So next thing to try is to swap my brothers 8800gt on my rig and see if it does the same freezes. I thought this problem only occured with 8 series Nvidia cards running in Win32bit, but now i see that there are new cards like GTX 280 that are doing the same freezing :(
Just found this thread after posting my own. Having pretty much the same issues with my 8800 GT. Having read this over, I suppose I just saved a bit of money on a mobo, but it's a shame I'll have to replace my card, even though there really isn't anything wrong with it.
I agree. I have same flaky issue. I bought a new video card. Still same issue. Swapped memory. Still same issue. Reset Bios. Still same issue. Nvidia denies the problem even with new driver. Microsoft says its nvidia. And, I have update all chipset drivers. All I know is that system is stable in all programs without nvidia driver but resolution is terrible with just the microsoft vga driver. I can not get past the log in screen once the driver is loaded, but the resolution on the log in screen looks great and windows fails to start.
The funny thing is that this problem just appeared out of nowhere when my windows live mailbox went over 2 gigs. I removed windows live mail and every since then, I have had nvidia video problems. There maybe no relation but this is when my video problems started.
I have an Nvidia 8800GTS running 64bit Windows 7. When I was testing Windows7 RC the video would constantly freeze at start up. No update ever resolved that issue, but since I've upgraded to a real copy of Windows7 I get graphic jitters in the right hand corner by the clock and in the middle of the screen. Its just annoying, but I am glad that I haven't experienced any freezing with the hard copy...
The temperature is normal and all the connections are tight so I am sure its not a hardware issue. I agree 100% Windows7 and the Nvidia 880GTS DO NOT LIKE EACH OTHER.
I am an experienced tech and nothing Ive tried has worked. This is a deep problem.
