M17 random, reoccuring freezes.

i own an M17 2.8ghz dual core, with 4 gigs of ram. the system freezes often whenever i am gaming on it, the temperatures seem to be okay.

sometimes i get a BSOD with something relating to ATI drivers in the stop error, and sometimes it just freezes without a BSOD.

Any idea what might be causing this. i am using the stock Alienware drivers, which i reinstalled instead of 9.5, because i wanted to test if that would stop the freezing. it has not obviously.

i also would like to add that i have used driver sweeper to uninstall my previous drivers.

 

There's a good chance that driver sweeper may have accidently deleted an important part of the registry. I would restore, if it's not too much trouble, and check your results. If you continue to get the BSOD, there may be an issue with the video card/cards.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

this use to happen before i used driver sweeper, the error i am now getting is that the ati driver has stopped working.

"Display driver atikmdag has stopped responding and has recovered successfully" of course the game crashes when this happens.

 

definitely Driver clash

You need to uninstall all ATI stuff then run driver sweeper and i would run CCleaner registry cleaner then reinstall AW drivers

 

i have already done that several times, however i will try that one more time, can't argue with teh Moo

 

uninstalled the drivers, ran driver sweeper in safe mode, reinstalled the stock alienware drivers, and the issue is still occurring. computer locks up and has to be restarted manually.

 

I had had lockup issues with my OCZ Whitebook. Although I assumed that it is due to my Vista installation being mad at the fact that when I installed it there was RAID array and now that install is imaged to a stand alone disk. SP2 seemed to help a lot, but still locks up sometimes or does not shut down completely - just hangs at shut down screen forever (until I cold boot it, although on reboot windows acts like there was a normal shutdown). It does not happen very often at all anymore though, I want to reinstall Vista and all programs/drivers but do not have the time or patience to do all that again.

 

It might be time to do a clean install of your OS.

At least this way you should be able to determine if it's a software related issue.

 

i did a clean install no too long ago, when i replaced my hard drive, because it had bad sectors. (the hard drive the laptop was originally shipped with was faulty)

 

Was that clean install after the freezing?

 

no, do you really think it will make a difference if i do another clean install? considering that the last one was less than 2 months ago.

 

Yes. For sure. If you do a clean install your problem will either be gone or you'll be able to eliminate software being the cause of the problem.

You've removed the old drivers, installed new ones and you're still getting an ATI error. It's likely a damaged or corrupted file necessary for graphics rendering. If this is the case, a clean install will solve your problem.

 

I'm actually thinking that AW did something slightly wrong with the initial setup of my system, before I updated to the Catalyst 9.6 drivers my system would just randomly BSOD about once a day...weird.

The odd thing is when overclocking it never BSODs...rather the screen just goes blank for half a second and it restarts.

 

so my system has several odities about it. i spent a few hours with dondadah88 last night troubleshooting stuff and had trouble with a few different driver versions, right now I have the original 8.54's haha as I KNOW that they work. But HWmonitor is a program that will crash often and cant be fully closed and keeps windows from shutting down (just sits at the shut down screen forever). Explorer.exe crashes often as well. Those 2 things as well as frequent failure to shut down properly (just hanging at screen) have been annoying. Any thoughts?

And are there any known issues with using Mobility Modder.net's tool? or is it considered very reliable for Vista (x64) use? I wanna try reinstalling my 9.6 drivers but with confidence this time.

 

i bsod alot when i had catalys 9.6 on my m17...i just installed beta 9.7 catalysts and no longer bsod....but 9.6 doesnt like some games

 

Where did you find the beta 9.7? I am very interested in that. And it Mob Modded ok for the 3870s?

 

yeah here is it for vista/windows 7

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=COO6B3QC

 

thanks. I never BSOD but Dondadah88 thought that my issues were all (possibly) related to the ATI driver and issues between it and the .net framework.

 

well just make sure u have the latest framework via windows updates...make sure u have all the updates, and have you installed vista service pack 2 yet?

 

yep, had 2.0. 2.4 and 3.5, as well as SP2 for vista. SP2 actually helped alot with system reliability for me. I still have the same problems, but much less frequently. That's why we called it a night around 4:30 am haha, after 6 hours we still couldn't tell what was causing the trouble. I am still very suspect that I need a clean VISTA install but sadly am WAY to lazy and short on time to do such an operation as I have many programs as well.

 

if 9.7 beta doesnt work i would def to a complete re-install of vista

 

Thanks for the link Halo,

I'm downloading 9.7 now.

 

yeah me too, cheers.

I used to get very similar issues until I installed Windows 7 RC as a clean install and no problems since.

 

I am reinstalling my OS this weekend, i have both Vista and Win7 as options, you all recommend Win7 over Vista then? I need a clean slate so that I know what is and isn't working on this dam notebook.

 

I couldn't get the beta 9.7 to work. Sorry.

 

When did the freezing/BSOD's start?

 

if you are asking me, the freezing started about a month ago. first time it happened was when i updated my drivers to 9.6. it seems that now it even freezes in windows while i am not running anything, which wasn't happening a week ago.

 

thanks halo for the 9.7 beta ..... i was waiting for that to arrive, only had xp virsion.

chers bud