All right, to preface this entire message, I am an amateur with complicated computer fixes. System Restore is pretty much the extent of my trouble shooting knowledge.
Last night, after attempting to open a VLC media file, my laptop essentially shit itself. The screen went black, then came back on. Little artifacts started appearing all over. The computer, or display at least, completely freezes. A little warning message popped up in the task bar area, saying
"display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." This seems like a lie, though since all the problems remain.
I'm on my parents computer writing this post. I've looked online for solutions, and found this is a somewhat common problem for Vista. Suggestions for a solution include a hotfix from Microsoft,
deleting a regular Windows update, messing with the power the computer draws, and so on. The problem is, the freezing/glitching upon start up is so bad I can barely access anything before the computer freaks out again and restarts itself.
I can run in Safe Mode with no problems.
As the title suggests, I'm running 32 bit Vista on my HP laptop. I have 3 gigs of RAM, a 512 MB videocard, dual core processor.
I'm at a loss. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? Or am I completely fucked?
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Is there anything I can do from Safe Mode that will help in regular mode? Because that's really the only way I can do just about anything on my laptop. Or maybe I can transfer a fix via flashdrive? I don't know.
But I may be on to something! The computer randomly decided to, like, work, so I am currently downloading the newest drivers for my videocard. Here's hoping things work out. Thanks for the help, either way.
Before this, I had a blue screen come up telling me there may have been a problem with recently installed hardware or software, which seems to indicate to me that the drivers were fucked.
Aaaaand now the computer shuts off automatically a few seconds after I try to boot it. And this has happened consistently for the past 45 minutes or so. Excellent.
Then after a while windows started blue-screening on startup (again, nvlddmkm errors). About one time in ten I could get windows to load ok, but the card would just stop responding after a few minutes.
I tried several different drivers, checked temperatures (which were perfectly fine), googled possible causes and fixes for a couple of hours and tried a whole bunch of them, but got fed up and finally tried installing the card in two other computers which both experienced the exact same problems.
Shortly thereafter the graphics card unsurprisingly died.
I hope in your case it's just some messed up driver error, but it sounds a lot like what happened to me, and I wasted a lot of time googling fixes before I just gave up and tried it out in my old computers.
I just got done speaking with an HP tech guy whose solution to my problem was complete system recovery.
Gee, thanks, guy. But I think I could have figured out "wipe everything!" by myself.
nVidia put out some crap laptop chips that were 100% guaranteed to fail a year or two ago. At my work, our nVidia laptops from a couple of years ago are failing.
If you can prove to the support people that the problem isn't OS related and you're under warranty push for a video card/motherboard replacement.
Anyone using 196.75 should rollback pronto. Nvidia agrees with this, and is encouraging such on their website.