This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
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...
Clean boot, ran Left4Dead 2, 5 minutes or so and it crashed. Totally clean, not even any boot items or services running, done as perscribed in the above link. So now I guess it's steam or win7 or nvidia or my hardware. Options 1 and 4 are pretty much right out, though tomorrow starts my video card swap test with my friend, so we'll see what's up.
Causality does not prove correlation, but it certainly helps. Any doubters out there, are you reading all this?
Left4Dead 2 crashed within 5 minutes. Predictable. I might as well clean boot troubleshoot now out of boredom. No one can hold it against me after that.
0 crashes thus far today.
Chages made:
If everyone out there reading this thread who has the issues could disable the Stereoscopic 3D service and see if that helps, it would be useful to see if it yields similar results for you all.
However, the person above with the issue in XP worries me. XP does not support the stereoscopic 3D glasses, but I wonder if the service still blindly installs itself? I would think not... different driver download, right?
Oh, and as for the clean boot troubleshooting and the list of possible culprits up there... it just seems highly unlikely. Remember, I ran this computer with this configuration and those exact pieces of software for months using the release candidate. They have not changed so I felt it a little redundant. If they are causing this type of issue, I'd eat my hat.
I have had some problems in two different video cards. Windows 7 X64. After hibernation it could not be awakened with mouse or keyboard. I disabled hibernation for video card and harddisk and selected a blank screen saver so the monitor goes black after the selected amount of time. Not a good fix but better than a locked up PC.
