video driver crashes

[Zorac]

my video driver keeps crashing. my screen goes black and a popup in they tray says something along the lines of 'video driver has stopped working and has been restarted'

video card is a gts 450 and im using the latest drivers, this has been ongoing for a while (6 months off and on) and driver versions dont seem to matter. the onboard video doesnt have any issue when i pull the video card out. the problem has been becoming more frequent, and forwhatever reason if i reinstall windows it solves the issues for a bit. at one point it was so bad though all i was getting was blue screen of death on boot, and a reinstall didnt fix the issue either.

after the i couldnt get the blue screen of death to go away, i took the card in (still under warranty) and memex benched it overnight with no issue. took it back home, computer worked fine for two weeks, and started giving me errors again, (at least no blue screen this time)

any ideas? mb on the way out? power source?

its a gigabyte board with a core 2 quad and a corsair 620w powersource, and im running windows 7 professional.

[elite]

I doubt its a problem with the motherboard as your on-board works fine. To be honest it could just be a faulty card. If you haven't overclocked it or anything (if you did try reverting it) you could see if you still have warranty on it and rma it.

Before that download driver sweeper and run it in safe mode.

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

Uninstall your drivers, reboot into safe mode, use the program to get rid of the driver completely, and then reboot into windows and re-install the drivers. Sometimes older drivers can leave behind some files that can cause stability issues.

As well, see what the temps the video card is running at. If its running hot, you can try getting another cooler.

Lastly is the driver crashing while you are gaming or browsing or just randomly?

[Zorac]

i think i did that when i first started having problems, ill give it another go, although driversweeper seems to be discountinued now?

the nvidia drivers give the open to remove all the settings and what not and i did try that, and i know i did try uninstalling everything in safemode before reinstalling once.

seems to be pretty random, im not overclocked, the temp idles around 30degrees, i forget how high it gets when im playing a game, but never past what its designed for. i remember checking that too, and i montor with gpu-z when im playing games.

seemed odd that the blue screen issue when away after i had pulled it out and put it back in though. thats why i was thinking maybe a plug or power source issue.

[elite]

do you have access to another video card? Try that and if the problem persists then you can isolate it down to the slot on the motherboard.

More than likely it has to due with the drivers. For some reason windows vista and 7 are really picky when it comes to graphics drivers.

Take a read through these threads:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=45605

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=215256

and

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=65161


**EDIT**

here is an updated link from driver sweeper:

http://majorgeeks.com/Driver_Sweeper_d6171.html

A complete wipe and re-install is what I would recommend doing first.

[01RedDX]

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[Zorac]

nope, just goes black, then i get the recovery error.

there is alot of mention of firefox in the nvidia threads linked above though. i had googled this a couple months ago and no one had mentioned firefox. there are some settings suggestions for firefox as well, so maybe ill give that a try after using drivesweeper and a fresh install on the drivers.

i have tried the other suggestions in the threads as they are the same ones going aournd for a while, including the roll back, playing with different files, etc.

i recently aquired an old x800 i could swap in. the main problem is i can go 2 to 3 weeks before crashes (i typically, although not always, shut down the computer at night) so its hard to know if its fixed or not!

thanks for the drivesweeper link.

[elite]

No problem. My computer does this randomly as well (I have a gt220 on windows 7 x64) and it only started happening after I updated the drivers. It really hasn't bothered me as I use my laptop most of the time or my playbook but I could see that it could become an inconvenience if its on your primary computer.

Hopefully that solves the issue for you and if the problem persists feel free to pm me and I could look into it further for you (its finals time and I love to procrastinate when it comes to studying for finals).

[Zorac]

almost 3 weeks later, and so far so good. looks like it was the hardware acceleration option in firefox.

thanks again for the help.