Studio 17 BSOD with external monitor.

I've been reading this forum for a while just havent had a reason to post until now. I got my Studio 1735 in September with an ATI 3650 video card. Recently i've started using an external monitor also from dell. Rather annoyingly every so often the screens start flickering and it says that the video driver has failed. After that I get the BSOD. I've tried updating to the newest video drivers on dell site and it didnt change anything. Is anyone experiencing the same problem or can anyone offer any help?

 

This issue has finally been resolved w/latest Catalyst 8.12 driver from:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx

or

http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/

Latest Dell driver is outdated and doesn't include the external monitor BSOD fix...

 

I have the same problem...BSOD probably once every 2 days and at least 1 recoverable crash on the day in between.

The lastest catalyst driver versions 9.1 and 8.12 still contain driver version 8.512.0.0 for Vista-32. I presume it has only changed for XP since other people seem to be posting the the driver has been updated, but you can confirm in the "custom installation" that the installer does include this old driver on the component screen.

Don't believe ATI's release notes either. Here is a copy and paste:
The Catalyst™ Software Suite 9.1 contains the following:
• Radeon™ display driver 8.573

Which is just not true... at least not for vista-32. Either they stuffed up the release and included the wrong driver version (in which case they should correct it immediately!), or their release notes are wrong and you shouldn't believe this whole "one catalyst driver for every platform" rubbish because it means that their software releases are actually platfom specific between XP, XP-64, Vista-32 and Vista-64, so they should have seperate release notes for each platform!

The ball is squarely in the court of ATI because Dell are using the same driver version so it's not their fault. I presume the reason why ATI hasn't released a later vista-32 driver than 8.512 is because the later version are actually less stable, but there's not much else to do in the consumer environment except kick and scream until they fix it.

 

I would recommend downloading the latest Catalyst driver from the ATI website, and use the Driver Heaven Mobility Modder tool to allow it to be installed on an ATI Mobility Radeon card. Much better performance than the ones you get from OEM's i think.

 

Ahh Gazza you're a champion! The information on Mobility Modder was all news to me! I now have the latest 9.1 catalyst driver with the 8.573 display driver installed.

I didn't realise this was what was going on. The installer was quite misleading saying that it was installing the same version that I already had installed!

As soon as I modded the installer and ran it, the correct driver version was there finally! I guess that was part of the whole problem. So this is Dell's fault after all!

I will see how things go over the next few days. If I don't post again you know that my problem is fixed

 

let us know either way mate, so other people will know if it is a confirmed fix or not

 

Latest driver fixed my BSOD issue w/external monitor although I would never use any modding tool since it would break my blu-ray playback. Instead, just properly installed ATI Catalyst the old-school method via device manager. Works just fine!

 

Yep my problem has been fixed by the driver mod trick on the Catalyst 9.1 driver to get them to install properly. I've been running stable for over a month now. I did call Dell support about how I resolved my issue and that they need to update their drivers, for whatever good it will do.