E6500: display driver has stopped responding and has successfully recovered

I have an e6500 with an Nvidia graphics card. I'm running Win7 with all current drivers, including the latest graphics card driver.

Today, while doing nothing particularly graphics-intensive--I was just surfing the Web, writing documents--the display repeatedly flashed to black, then went back to normal, and I got this message:

"Display driver has stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Searching around, I see most people who have such a problem are told to update their drivers, but I'm already running the latest ones.

Should I be worried--could this mean my graphics card is failing?

 

I keep a backup and never worry. Probably the driver faulting for some no good reason... a hardware fault is likely to be harder/unrecoverable... just guessing. Watch for an update. If it becomes chronic, could try safe mode driver for a few hours to rule out hardware fault... then maybe downgrade nVidia driver for better stability or re-install current driver.

GK

 

That sounds more like a software error than a hardware error, so I wouldn't be too worried.

 

I used to this occasionally with my E6400 + Intel graphics when running XP. If my memory is correct, the Windows crash analyser eventually told me to change one of the settings in the 3D options in the driver and the problem went away.

I haven't seen a re-occurrence during the past month after changing to W7-64.

John