Bad Drivers or Bad Video Card??

I got an m15x from last year with the 8800M GTX. I'm running Vista Business 64-bit.

I am currently experiencing issues with display stability. My screen will black out after I log in and wait for everything to start up. If I wait, the computer will reboot on it's own. After a few times of doing this, my computer mellows out or something and I am able to continue doing whatever it is I want to do on the laptop; gaming, browsing, etc.

I'm thinking it could be a driver issue because it occurs when Windows is starting up all the other things after login, but wanted to get everyone's take on the matter. I have tried the recent drivers from myHive and I have tried the one from Laptop2Go. Could there be some other driver or software that I might have installed that could be conflicting? I have tried fresh installs twice now and every time I think it's going smoothly, when I start up from an overnight shutdown, I have this issue. If I just start it up from a hibernate, I don't.

 

Anyone with any idea??

 

what cpu u have? is it ocd?

 

It can possibly be a driver issue. Try using the drivercleaner from drivercleaner.net. use it to completely remove the video driver. Then reinstall the driver. Hope this works out.

 

I am having no luck whatsoever. I tried using a different driver after using that drivercleaner software. I tried re-installing everything again. Still no dice.

Anyone know anything else to try? Do the 64-bit drivers conflict with any of the AW apps? Should I not re-install some of the things like OSD Utility etc.?

This is really frustrating. I can't find a driver my laptop likes.

 

I would try a fresh install and then install nothing (no drivers, games, anything. Install nothing except the drivers and stuff that comes with the refresh install) and see if it still does it. If it DOESN'T do the reboot thing with nothing extra installed, then install one thing at a time (drivers, games, etc) and test after each install to see which one is causing the issue. if nothing else it will help narrow things down.

 

Ok, I thought I eliminated the issue when I went to Windows 7 but it didn't go away. Only reason everything was cool was because I had the AW downclocking thingy turned on. (I was wondering why all of a sudden gaming performance was sucking it)

So anyways, I'm running 186.61 drivers and my screen will black out. It appears if I downclock to half the speed everything is fine or when sitting at idle (for the most part). GPU-Z and HWMonitor got my GPU sitting at 63 degrees @ idle. Fan is working and I hear it speed up and speed down.

I have the T8300 cpu and it is not OC'd, nothing is OC'd. GPU-Z shows video at 500//799/1250.

It's wierd though that after a few restarts everything seems to become stable. I'd like it not to black out at all, but after a few restarts everything seems cool and working normally. So based upon that, I would think that my video card was fine.

 

Ok, I am continuing to troubleshoot this issue. I even rolled back to my original hard drive with AW's default settings installed except I went to the 175.80 beta driver from myHive before I upgraded my hard drive and went to Windows 7.

But anyways, it seems the only way I get any true stability with no issues or crashes at all is when I press the "underclocking" button on my machine. But that's all find and dandy for normal stuff but I can't game for sh1t with that configuration.

So I really thinking maybe the card did go bad?? Because I have tried every driver I can get my hands on and nothing seems to be working. Could I really just be having bad luck with drivers and I don't need to replace the card?

I'm going to give it one more whirl to install everything from scratch again but any other input from the community would be great.

 

Did you try running on integrated? You should be able to boot the pc on integrated by holding the right touchpad button. Give it a shot and see what happens

 

I guess I mean, I get stability when I go into Stealth Mode.

 

Hmmmm, is there a way to switch to integrated graphics card if hitting Fn+F7 isn't working?

 

yes, turn off the laptop. now hold the right button of the mousepad and wait. It should start with integrated gfx

 

Ok, i was able to start up with the integrated video and have no issues, except for that fact that one cannot game using the integrated video.

 

then its most likely your nvidia card which is broken

 

i had this problem with my m17x. it happens when there's a corruption in the discrete gpu's drivers or if you have conflicting drivers loaded. alienrespawn fixed it for me. when i had it happening it would go black immediatley after getting to the login screen and if i ran in stealth mode it would work fine. but yeah alienrespawn fixes the problem

 

Hmmm, if only I knew were my respawn discs were hiding, I would definitely want to give that a try flea

But I guess, for one last time, I will try installing everything from scratch and in Vista 32-bit

Wattos, i really hope that isn't the case. Cause I will just kick myself even more for not remembering to extend my warranty while I had the chance.

 

What is interesting and makes me think it could just be a driver issue and I haven't found the right one, is because occasionally the screen will flicker before it blacks out, and sometime, not often, windows says it has recovered from the nvidia kernel being unstable.

If the card went bad, would that still happen?