Graphic/Display BSOD Instability M17xR3

So I've been experiencing an intermittent problem with my M17xR3 (in my sig).

It shows itself as either a solid gray/black screen or a striped black and white screen, or a BSOD on the AMD drivers. It seems to occur most after a longer period of non-use.

So to break it down:

I use my laptop most frequently at work, but I only work at nights on the weekend, 13.5 hours a night 3 days a week. The rest of the time my notebook sits quietly in my backpack waiting for the following weekend.

When I'm at work I tend to surf lightly and chat with people in World of Warcraft when things are slow, but I've noticed that on the first night of the week most commonly that I will see a flickering of the display. It'll appear to just be a window flicker, then later the whole screen will flicker, and it will gradually worsen. Then finally the above issue will occur, either the screen will gray or black out, or it will BSOD on me citing the AMD graphics driver as the problem.

After the crash and reboot it'll tend to run just fine for the remainder of the night (even through the whole weekend).

I had originally updated my graphics drivers to 11.6 and when this started I suspected it might tbe the cuprit so I backed it down to stock shipped drivers, but it is still occurring.

Anyone experiencing similar issues or have any suggestions to further troubleshoot/fix/identify the cause?

Thanks

EDIT

BTW who crashed me states exactly what I've said, its the AMD driver with a 0x116 bugcheck (driver issue) on atikmpag.sys

I've also done a system restore and it was happening both before and after the restore.

 

I am also experiencing that kind of problem. I don't know what to do anymore.
I updated all of my drivers to its latest version and that problem too of yours is the only one my M17-R3 is having.

But still, it has something to do with our video card drivers.
BTW... my video card is AMD Radeon 6870.

 

I have a feeling it might be related to hardware acceleration in Flash video as it always seems to be while a browser is open even if I'm doing something else. And most sites have flash ads or videos.

Previously I had this issue with my desktop that has a Radeon 5870. So I've disabled hardware acceleration for Flash to see if it will correct it.

If you decide to try it, be sure to reboot after disabling hardware acceleration on Flash video. I've found from previous experience that there seems to be some lingering effects despite it supposedly being off if you do not reboot.

 

Thank you, i'll disable the hardware acceleration for flash video then.

But, i had a situation when none of my applications were open, it's just the game i was playing yet it'll still crash randomly and funny... sometimes it doesn't crash at all. I don't know but i'll conduct an observation immediately regarding of our problem here.

There's a culprit here... may be it's in the video card or the OSD.

 

Aye, it's still up in the air for me, I'll probably know more later as it seems more likely to happen if the laptop has been off for some period of time. It usually happens after my laptop has been off for a week, then doesnt happen again all weekend.

 

Why don't we try to uninstall our video card driver and install it again?

 

Well the issue doesnt appear to be fixed despite having disabled the hardware acceleration, so I'm going to driver sweeper off the drivers and re-install them. Here's hoping.

 

So I cleared off the drivers, both ATI and Intel and used driver sweeper. Installed fresh from the downloadable package from Dell. Issue still occurs.

I'm noticing in another thread though that black screen freezes could possibly be caused by the OSD. I had apparently not updated my OSD yet so I have just done that. We'll see what happens.

As it sits currently:

Installed Dell driver package, was still unstable so I went ahead and installed 11.6 on top of it (since it didnt seem to make a difference)
Installed new OSD

 

Mr. Beradon

I found the problem in my rig. When my GPU temperature reaches 96% it starts to flicker a bit and goes into black screen or white stripes or sometimes BoSD. I've limit my GPU performance and i haven't got any problems for almost a month now.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately that doesnt appear to be the case with my card, I have it sitting on a cooler and GPU-Z never reports more than about 63-70'C when playing WoW windowed with firefox and Windows Media Player running (the most common way I've found that this issue occurs for me).

I've had a thought on the issue, but someone here will have to help me.

Is there someone here running the 6870M with hardware id 68A8 that is NOT experiencing a GSOD that could save their vBIOS for me and host it somewhere for me to download (or contact me via pm and I'll send you my email address).

I've been doing some reading and it appears it can be caused by a faulty vBIOS. I've never flashed my card but I suppose there's a chance it could have been faulty from the factory.

I'm sort of grasping here... I've tried a number of things at this point:

Updated OSD
Reinstalled OSD
Uninstalled OSD
Cleared off ATI drivers
reinstalled base Dell graphics drivers
updated graphics drivers
disabled ULPS
disabled powerplay (this is the only option that seems to have worked, however with powerplay disabled, my card runs at half clock so my games run terribly)

I'm open to any other suggestions.