Nvidia 260.99 Driver Crash

Good day fellow M17x peeps,

It has been weeks since I first started having this problem. I have looked all over, and under for an answer, I have tried many things on my laptop to fix it to no avail. The problem is this;

When I run movies on my M17xR1 (for specs see my sig-) my computer locks up making a loud buzzing sound from the speakers. Totally frozen. The only way to bring my computer back to life is holding down the power button and doing a cold boot. The odd thing is this only started happening after installing the Nvidia 260.99 drivers, and 90% of the time only when using a LCD TV as a second monitor (when using the LCD it WILL crash, when not using one, it only crashes once in a while).

The crashing seems to be linked to the playback of movies. When I pull the bar half way through a film to the middle or so, and when opening a new film as another is playing. Games run fine, music, Photoshop, ext... the problem seems to be restricted to movies.

I have tried reinstalling all my players, codec, ext... nothing worked. Any ideas guys?

 

Its a known problem with the M17x and the verde (260 version) drivers.
Go back to the P06 dell drivers or the one batboy modded from the M17x-R2.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/535696-modified-nv-197-52-driver-m17xr1-only.html

No matter what you do, stay away from the verde drivers for now.

D.

 

Try the new nVIDIA beta ones 266.35 posted on the 4th Jan been using them since and no issue,i've posted here you'll be happy . And what you encountered is a known issue see here.People say R1 is problematic,i say IT'S WRONG it was poorely supported and also it's not a lazy man's laptop.

 

thanxxx guys

 

No problem you should normally find stability.If not you know you can always look for help here.Keep us posted!
cheers

 

Yea...these are running fine in on my system too.

 

I have been using the 266.35 drivers for a day or two now. In a week or two I will post the results, (if it helped with the crashes).

 

It had been less than a week, and the freezes still continue.

Still watching movies, but now also when I log out of FFXIV (the game runs great, only freezes when I log out). Not every time, only once in every 10-15 times... but still that suxXx.

I have been searching more and more online this seems to only happen to people with the Nvidia 260m cards and only when they have SLI. Am I correct in this belief?

Any tricks to even drop the count for freezes/crashes would be a great help, thanxXx in advance.

 

Flash is easy, simply right click on a flash movie window, goto settings, disable hardware acceleration.

WMP is harder, you can disable DirectX hardware acceleration is the Options->Performance Tab but that only counts for Microsoft Codecs. If you're playing a movie in WMP with a non-MS codec, that setting doesn't seem to matter.

Games are allot more cloudy. Seems most stable with not installing the 3D stereoscopic driver, and I currently have Physx set to CPU. Not really sure if its helping since I'm not running any Physx games, but I also haven't had any game related crashes (including Witcher, BF:BC2, TF2, CO etc...).

 

The video tricks I already did that, I will try taking the stereoscopic driver out, (I never use it anyway). I will keep ya posted.

 

I don't know I've an R1 with the 9300 processor and 280M cards and I crash a lot in games. Getting to the point where I might just buy a new laptop and STAY FAR AWAY from ALIENWARE and DELL. Only a few games don't crash to desktop on this machine. It's a completely unstable machine for heavy gaming.

I was invited to the Rift beta this weekend and the engine was running smooth as silk, but I am crashing every 20 minutes or so, just like in Dragon Age. The drivers make no difference. I just can't get anything out of this piece of junk.

 

@ Fezziwig Uninstall your current drivers,boot into Safe Mode run CCleaner and clean your registry,then go to DELL website or just click here. Download and install the 197.84 drivers,you'll find stability with everything you throw at this machine!

 

well, it has been a week or so, I have not had one crash since I uninstalled the Nvidia 3D-Vision =^_^= "Nice!"

Thanxxx again guys!

 

Great to hear that you're back on your wheels.

 

I have tried every driver combination possible... right now im running 266.58, i didnt install the 3d vision driver. I still get a screen freeze atleast once a day. Im glad the screen no longer goes black, but the drivers still crash and require a reboot. I sincerely hope that someone out there has figured out a way to fix the driver issues.
My system is a m17x-r1
t9600 processor
8gb ram
dual 280m gtx's
Currently not running sli, one card dedicated to physx, seems like sli causes the crash more frequently.
Should i just remove one of the video cards.... seems like people with just a single nvidia video card doesnt have as many problems with their system stability.

 

SlateJones, if you want to use the latest nVidia verde drivers just reboot press F2 to enter BIOS > Advanced > Graphic Settings > disable PCIE Gen2. This will force your cards to run at 8x bandwith and will no longer be pushed above by the drivers causing your system to crash.

 

I appreciate the quick reply. I will definitely give it a try. Thanks.

 

You should be good with that if you installed your drivers properly.
No problem glad to help.

 

I went ahead and flashed to new a07 bios that came out this week and disabled the pcie gen2... your not gonna believe me but my system is twice as fast after the first reboot... I hope it holds together.lol.
Thank you so much.

 

It should stay like that