“Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error.

Solution! -- or MY solution, at least

In my motherboard BIOS I disabled "CPU Turbo boost" and "CPU Power Management."

This issue has totally gone away, and with zero impact to overall system performance.

Please note -- every bios is different and motherboard / notebook manufactures may not expose these identical settings in your bios, so no guarantee this will work for you... :(

Now able to run 5+ instances of VLC all with 1080p videos playing in each on multiple monitors, while at the same time, scrolling around in google earth w/ high graphics settings...

I am seriously trying to get it to hang up but it wont! Guess that means PROBLEM SOLVED!

So, I reluctantly created a windows account JUST to share my solution with everyone here. Read on if you want my detailed explanation.

So this was effing me off to no end and tried many of the recommended solutions with zero results. Display driver just kept locking up on my newfangled expensive system.. mainly when watching 1080p video in VLC, but also more recently in Google Earth when I enabled Anisotropy and Anti-aliasing (which rendered GoogleEarth TOTALLY UNUSABLE). Also a few other less common lock-ups in Photoshop CS5.

I had used anisotropy and anti-aliasing in Google Earth on windows 7 on my old desktop, which handled it flawlessly (and I do mean OLD, athlon 3200+ w onboard nV6250LE Graphics). So when my new near-top-end system (specs below) utterly and completely failed to work with the EXACT SAME SETTINGS I wasnt going to rest until I found a solution.

I read disabling win7aero has helped some.. didnt bother trying that, my old system handles it fine, and I'm not making GUI compromises on a brand new system! I figured it had to be a power issue and at first even considered upgrading my power supply. But I decided I should exhaust all other possibilities before just throwing money at the problem. I mean, everything being as 'green' as it is today, it makes sense that newfangled power reduction features could lead to issues when using high demand apps. So, dinked around with any/every 'power' setting I could find until trial and error eventually produced some results.

Side Note:

I am a nVidia user and one other thing I did was load up the nVidia Control Panel, and under 3D Settings - Manage 3D Settings - Global settings - Power Management Mode, I changed the setting to "Prefer Maximum Performance" This setting did not have immediate results (driver was still locking up), but I am leaving it as is anyway--still runs plenty cool at idle, so why bother dropping the voltage. Besides, I could care less if I draw a few extra watts full time.

My System Spec:

Supermicro c7q67 motherboard (q67 chipset)

Intel i7 2600 CPU

nVidia GTX570 GPU

Corsair Ram, 16gb @ 1333mhz

Xion 850W Power Supply

Intel 120gb SSD boot drive

6tb RAID (4 2tb Western Digital 'Green' disks)

Primary System uses:

Industrial design, graphic design, 3d design / animation, motion graphics, PC virtualization, and yes gaming, movies, etc.

Primary causes of Video Driver lockups:

VLC 1080p video (h264 or other), google earth (w/ anisotropy antialiasing), photoshop CS5.1 (w videocard features enabled, while zooming too quickly on large images)

Last words:

I never experienced a driver lockup when full-screen gaming, only in window'd apps using graphics card to render content (e.g. Google Earth, VLC, Photoshop CS5, etc). Further proof that power management is to blame, as full screen DirectX will kick off any gpu/cpu power reduction garbage first thing--not so in most window'd apps, afaik.

That should do it -- hope this helps.

I've just installed a Radeon 5450 card in my 9-month old Dell Inspiron to replace the integrated graphics and this problem appeared every 10-15 minutes afterward.  Took me nearly 2 hours to solve it.

The solution (at least, for my machine):

The card's driver set-up program includes Catalyst Control Center, which supposedly looks after the card configuration.  BUT - IT DIDN'T UNINSTALL THE EXISTING VERSION!  After several re-installs of the software that came with the graphics card, including upgrading to v11.12, I did some checking and found that Dell's pre-installed version was still live and active, so the two of them were conflicting!  No wonder there were problems.

After completely uninstalling v11.12 and all drivers associated with it, I then used the Win7 Control Panel to uninstall the original Catalyst Control Center program, and then re-installed v11.12.  All has worked fine since.

This might  explain why many people have had this problem with different configurations, if their machines have a pre-installed version of CCC.  Surely ATI's software should detect and remove an old version of CCC, regardless of its source, before installing the new???  Hardly rocket science.

I'm not saying that this will solve all instances of this problem message, but once I spotted it there was little doubt that it was at the root of mine.

I have been having this problem in the past few months with my 1 year old Dell XPS - Windows 7 computer. It seems to happen when an internet page is loading a video or when my kids play online video games. Dell and I have tried to update drivers. They have replaced the video card and now tell me it's a software and not a hardware issue. Extremely frustrating!

I'm pretty sure this is my problem also, my machine runs very cool, so heat is not the problem and the crashes always occur when doing basic things like watching youtube vids or playing a browser based java game. I have an nVidia gtx 580 card and never have any problems playing very graphically intensive games on ultra settings but simple stuff it apparently can't handle. Hopefully MS fixes this, it is extremely aggravating.