Is my graphics card causing problems with gaming?

I'm a new member here and I just want to start off by saying that this website has been quite useful when it comes to finding ways to fix problems. I've glanced over this site a few times and have learned some interesting things along the way.

However, my time as come to actually ask a question because I can't seem to find a solution.

My laptop is a 3 month old Gateway FX 6864 with Vista 64bit, the 15.4' one (my specs are to the left, if more are needed please ask). My issue is that during gameplay the laptop will crash hard. It will freeze on the spot (either with sound freezing as well or no sound at all), freeze with black screen, or BSOD. All situations require me to force the laptop to turn off and restart that way.

This problem began when I purchased Warhammer Online, a week after its release I believe. I was quite impressed to find the laptop could run the game max with a decent full-scree resolution. I was not impressed when it would start freezing up. After becoming fed up I started searching for answers. So I messed around with graphics settings (in-game and in Catalyst CC). No change at all. Started searching sites such as this one. I tried undervolting (a very cool mod I must say) to reduce heat. After a decent amount of heat reduction I tried playing Warhammer and recieved the same results. I tried some of BlackVipers supertweaks for Vista. Again, nifty mods but still no good results. At this point I thought I would try another game (to rule out whether or not this was an issue with EA or Warhammer itself), Need for Speed: ProStreet. This game is now a year old. Same results.

Just to make things more puzzling, I can run Spore (a new game and still EA) at max for extended periods of time without these issues. I also can play Phantasy Star Universe without complaints.

I like to consider myself somewhat computer adept. I have experience with replacing computer hardware on desktops but am new to laptops. I probably will acknowledge any ideas any has to fix my situation.

A posibility could be bad RAM? I've heard of that causing problems for some people.

Just know that I am aware my laptop isn't the greatest gaming machine out there, but I am also not really concerned about running games like Crysis. The fact that I can run Warhammer and NFS really well is good enough. I just want to solve this problem.

 

i would try updating the GPU driver.

 

What GPU is it exactly?

 

My apologies. I guess my information wasn't on the left as I had said, hehe.

My GPU is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2600 with 512MB memory. The drivers are provided by Gateway and I probably should have mentioned above that through my entire situation all my drivers were up-to-date (thats the first thing anyone should check I suppose, haha).

The driver that is available from Gateway is 8.452.0.0 (I am aware that ATI just released 8.11 but I am not sure if there is a big difference here. Unless my Gateway driver is somewhere along the lines similar to ATI 8.4, but thats just a guess).

 

The ATI radeon HD 2600 512 MB is more than enough to play that game, just update your drivers.

 

I know it is more than enough. But the ATI drivers are provided by Gateway, not AMD. The Gateway version is the one I mentioned above (8.452.0.0). Now, I suppose I could download 8.11 from AMD and use the "Have Disk" function to forcefully install a similar driver (such as the desktop version of the HD 2600) but I don't know how stable a decision like that is.

 

I've been using the mobility modder on ATI cards for basically the past year and have had no problems. You may as well try it out, if something goes weird, you can always uninstall the driver.

 

Where can I check this modder out?

 

http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php - mobility modder =p

 

Thanks, I'll give this a try.

Edit: Installed and functional.

 

How's it working for you now?

 

Tested using NFS rostreet.

Got through one race fine, did a bunch of customizing and such. Tried a second race and it auto-restarted on me. An improvement in my eyes but far from a solution.

Any new ideas?

 

Spoke to soon. Gave it another go and it froze again with sputtering noise.

A very strange mystery.

 

Just giving this a bump, I'll only do it once.

Problem still persists, half my games freeze up my laptop (resulting in a manual shut-down needed), games that it can easily run.

Things I've done:
-8.11 Catalyst drivers by means of Mobility Modder
-Undervolted using RMClock for cooling
-Cooling pad
-Re-checked to make sure all drivers are up-to-date
-Downloaded latest patches for the games
-Tried setting battery settings to "Performance"
-Tried setting Catalyst settings to Performance
-Tried setting in-game settings to best performance options

If I think of anything else I'll mention them.

Thanks