"Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered"

This has happened before, and then I didn't see it for awhile, and yesterday I receieved the error again. It usually only happens while playing World of Warcraft (I don't really play any other games, so I don't know if it would happen during something else...).

The error I receive is the title of this thread: "Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered."

This message appears in a little bubble that pops out of my system tray. What happens is my screen goes black for a second or two and then goes back to normal. I forget if anything crashed when it happened awhile ago, but yesterday nothing crashed after I receieved the error.

I have an ATI card with the 8.7 cats (I think... I'm not at home, so I don't know/remember at the moment) and am running Vista Ultimate 64bit. These specs should be in my sig.

Anyway, has anyone else ever had this issue? I've read this could be a driver, hardware, or heat issue.

Maybe I'll update to 8.8 when I get home.

 

Try this link, may help.

 

Thanks. I'll check that out once I get home.

 

I also have had received this error recently while playing Warcraft 3 (Not WoW). I'm using Nvida 8600m GT and Vista 32bit, but I havent been getting the errors since the last error msg.
Will try the link later. thx for the link

 

God, I'm lazy. I still haven't tried to fix this problem, and I seem to be receiving it more frequently in the last few days. It only happens when I'm playing World of Warcraft (however, I haven't really played any other game yet for a long period of time, so I wouldn't know if the error occurs with any other games right now ).

I also have outdated ATI drivers; I need to update those too. This problem is very annoying though. When it happens, sometimes it recovers and other times it attempts to recover about 5 times before throwing a blue screen at me and rebooting.

I need to stop procrastinating.

 

You're card isn't overclocked or modified in any way, is it?

 

I took off the stock heatsink and put on an Accelero S1 with a scythe fan ontop of that, so it stays pretty nice. But I've never OC'd it.

 

Are your temperatures fairly stable though? It's most likely a driver issue, you could try one of the previous versions of catalyst.

 

I haven't recorded my gpu temps for a bit, plus I have only really been playing WoW which isn't very graphic intensive, but if I remember correctly, they were pretty solid. I'll check them out again while playing just to be sure, but I think they stay pretty low.

Also, I think I'm using the 8.7 cats. Maybe a newer version will help... I just want this to stop <_<

 

i used to get this when playing wow as well, i quit a while back, but now that i think of it, i haven't noticed it happening since then.

i have an 8600m gt ddr3, so it isn't an ati thing.

 

Yeah, I know it's not an ATI thing. I have no idea what it is from. However, WoW does usually cause a bunch of errors

 

I get this same problem all the time when I'm in battery saver mode on Vista 64-bit Home Premium. I'm running a Gateway P-7811 FX with an Nvidia 9800m GTS and the driver is 176.28 I think, although the 28 might be wrong. It's only happened once on balanced and never (so far) on high performance mode. The old 175.xx stock driver would BSOD on me, but the 176.28 driver always seems to get recovered.

Not sure what's going on. The driver update to 176.28 seemed to temporarily halt the problem but it's definitely back again.

When I got hit with a BSOD the message was about failing to get the driver "power state". It was a power-related problem. I wonder if Vista is having problems interacting with the video card power management routines.

EDIT: I have not attempted to fix the problem yet since it is not severe enough to warrant attention...yet.

 

I used to get this problem while running NFS Carbon with a Go 7600(Vista Ultimate x64 driver). The game used to crash every 20 minutes or so. And no it was not restricted to a specific driver. I was so annoyed that I stopped playing that game.

 

On my old ATi 9600XT card if I check off the "Overdrive" option or w.e in CCC (the thing that auto-overclocks your card) I would get that message after a while of gaming. Not sure if this helps.

 

I have this problem too. It just started happening yesterday while I was watching a divx movie with VLC media player. It gave me that error message about the display driver and everything seemed to be working again. Then not too much later I got the BSOD and I couldn't even boot up my computer. Every time I would try, the screen would stay black (sometimes transitioning to dark gray) and just loop between turning off and on with seemingly no progress.

I then opened up the case of my laptop to make sure nothing was physically out of place. Took out the battery and drained the internal power...I was just trying to do anything I could to fix the problem. Sure enough, my computer (a Pavilion dv9200 w/ a nVidia GO 7600, btw) started up. I immediately got online and searched the error message. I also downloaded the latest nVidia driver offered on the HP website (I had been using the latest one from laptopvideo2go). I read something about power supplies and removing a stick of memory. Just as I was about to install the driver, I got the same error and the BSOD. I wasn't even doing anything graphics intensive (if you can even call what I was originally doing - watching a nonHD movie - that).

This time my computer refused to boot into Windows (or show the BIOS stuff). I removed a stick of memory (I have 2 1GB sticks) and it booted up. I installed the latest HP-distributed display driver and I thought my problem was fixed. Just to test it out, I played another video with VLC. I got another BSOD.

That was last night. I don't have a lot of time to be screwing around with my computer at the moment, but when I do find the time, I think I'll be using this site that a previous member posted:
http://www.repairyourpcnow.com/resources/atikmdag-has-stopped-responding.php
It looks fairly promising. I'm thinking this is indeed a hardware issue, and not a driver one. Both the latest nVidia driver from laptopvideo2go and the officially released one from HP didn't solve the problem. Plus, I never had a problem with any graphics drivers for the past year and half I've had the laptop.

I'll post any solutions to the problem I find. BTW, the one semi-solution that has seemed to work for me so far is to remove a memory stick. But Vista and my programs with 1GB is a pretty nasty sight.

 

Before getting into any crazy stuff, I recommend just updating to Catalyst 8.9 or 8.10. If I remember correctly, the 8.7 driver was none too stable for me either.

 

Yeah, except I have an nVidia graphics card. I did update to the latest GeForce Go 7600 driver, according to HP's site. I was going to update it via nVidia's own site, but it told me to do all driver updates via HP's own service.

btw, I encountered a new problem. My computer wouldn't even boot up with only 1 stick of memory in. I think I tried 20 different times to start it up and it finally worked. Right now I'm backing up all my data that I want to keep. Then I'll probably partition my hard drive and install Ubuntu, so I can use that while I'm trying to fix Vista. I can't just stop using my computer, because I have to use it for school. Hopefully Ubuntu won't have any similar problems.

 

I'm surprised no-one's brought this up, considering the number of threads that have been posted about it recently... Apparently it's a Vista thing. (a good thing).

Basically, sometimes when a Graphics Driver error occurs, instead of crashing the entire game, vista manages to reload the driver, enabling you to save and keep playing.

Unfortunately, if you have software OCd it, you will have to restart the computer before it will accept the OC again.

Sometimes when I'm playing FO3, the game will stutter, then get laggy as ****. When I check the desktop, I see the info-bubble you're referring to, and my clocks have been reset.

It's Vista's way of sayin "Hey Dude, you just broke the game, but I saved your arse."

I've got no idea what the serious stuff you guys have talked about is though...

 

What Dragunov said.
I receive this message when I get out of BS player after watching a movie fullscreen. I think Vista doesn't like the plugins it uses to decode the movie files.

 

I just updated my video drivers a few days ago, but I still receive this same error.