Notebook constantly crashing. Microsoft said it was drivers. Help!!

Hello again,

When playing games on my Acer Aspire 5500 I have been encountering crashes at various times (usually 10 - 15 min's in to a game), the screen either freezes of just goes black and there is no hard drive activity. Then i have to turn the power off. The crashes happen in every game I play Far Cry, Battlefield Vietnam, Age of Mythology.

I updated to the latest 6.11 cats (it happens) reverted back to my Acer CD video drivers (it still happens). This lead me believe this could possibly be a heat issue. So when my new cooler arrived I figured hey this will fix my problems but no! Still it crashes.

The last time it crashed I had no choice but to pull the plug and hit the power off button. When comming back to the desktop I was greeted with a serious error message, so I sent off the error report and Microsoft said this:

Error report summary:

Error type Windows stop error (A message appears on a blue screen with error code information)
Solution available? Yes
What does this error mean? You received this message because a device driver installed on your computer caused the Windows operating system to stop unexpectedly. This type of error is referred to as a "stop error." A stop error requires you to restart your computer.
Cause: A video adapter device driver
Computer symptoms: A message appears on a blue screen with error code information:

STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER
- or -
STOP: 0x100000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER_M


Please advise I just dont really know what to do anymore. I haven't been around computer problems like this for a long time.

Here are my specs:

Pentium M 760 (2.0 ghz) Centrino
Crucial 1GB DDR2 PC4200
ATI Mobility Radeon X700 (64mb)
WD Scorpio 5400rpm HDD (8mb cache)

 

Are you overclocked at all? Almost sounds like a heat/memory issue to me if it is in different games at a set point in time. I would download a memory diagnostic utility and run a full test on your ram first. If it passes, I would go into the bios on your laptop and see if you can change your fan settings. Find a setting "it differs per laptop, something about performance or fan" to run the fan all the time, then try playing the games again. Are you using the laptop on a hard, flat surface?

 

It cannot be a heat issue like I first thought it was. I purchased a Lian Li notebook cooling pad because of these crashes and cold air is being pumped directly into the computers underside vents, still the crashing continues.

As for overclocking I gave up on that after I fried my Geforce 4 Ti4600 like three years ago, the memory test my computer makes during POST comes back clean.

 

Oh no, not that error.

I have had that problem too. The only solution was formatting 3 times! Now I have no problems... Try formatting your whole notebook.

Charlie

 

If you overclocked and have higher than Catalyst 6.3...you're in trouble.

Also, Omega drivers have been having issues with the X??? series of cards for a while. Check out 6.3.

 

Sould I use the 6.3 Cats? Acer is absolutly useless for driver updates. Any suggestions where to find them?

Sounds a little better than formatting... 3 TIMES!!!

And please any more suggestions or comments??

 

Just because you are using a cooling pad does not eliminate it being a heat issue, although that is a good thing. The memory test that your laptop runs at POST basically confirms the amount of ram installed, it is not extensive. You need to find a memory test such as:

http://www.memtest86.com/

It willl attempt to read/write to different address in memory using different methods. Whereas the memory test at POST takes a few seconds, a thorough memory test can take an hour or more.

Give this a try, more often than not errors such as this can be hardware errors.

As for the heat issue, I have a 7800GT in my Desktop that started causing lockups in games. It turned out the heatsink was full of dust and that is what was causing the overheat problems, even though the fan and heatsink spun fine.

 

Formatting 3 times does not sound like a solution for any problem.

 

Formatting fixes everything!

 

Try this in command prompt:

CHKDSK /R

 

Ok Update:

I ran Memtest 86 (v3.2) for over two hours and NOTHING. My memory came back clean. So then I downloaded some new catalyst drivers from Acer, I ran driver cleaner (v3.3) and installed them.

To test I went into Far Cry and played with everything on maximum detail while playing through some of the most intensive scenes and 45 minutes later still NO crashes! I thought yes I am cured BUT then I decided to try Unreal 2.

I played Unreal 2 for twenty minutes through some intensive parts and then when I am staring at a wall (with nothing going on) it FREEZES!!

What is going on here!! I only reinstalled a week ago because I got a new hard drive. How can this be happening?

 

A new hard drive huh?

And this has been going on since you had the hard drive..

I say it's time to return the hdd.

A hard drive controls everything. If a hard drive is bad, it will cause crashes.

 

Well I have only had the whole computer for two weeks. I brought it used off an auction site. I have a rule to replace the hard drive in a used computer with a new one, to give the machine a new lease of life if you will.

I never even turned it on with the old hard drive in it, as soon as the computer arrived I just straight out swapped them over. Surely these problems could not be heat realated as how can it last 45 minutes of Far Cry with no events only to freeze other times during a game like Age of Mythology which is mostly CPU bound?

Could the GPU just simply be screwed? Maybe the previous own O/C'ed the GPU and damaged it...?

 

Just because you overclock doesn't mean you damage it, it just means it shortens the life (Even when the guy doesn't know what he is doing, newer cards usually shut off when they get too hot). Their isn't too much to worry about in the case of overclocking. I'd worry more about power outages when can kill a gpu in a flash.

I'd try a hard drive test, also format the old hard drive and try it... If they fail, then it could be the gpu... But honestly, it may be the cpu, if it's crashing on cpu intensive games...

YOU KNOW WHAT?

I had these kinds of problems alot of times a while back, back when I was using my 2500+ as a main pc. Things would crash, to the point where the pc would crash when I loaded it up...

I found my power supply was dying!

Try doing this, simply get a new battery for the thing, right now.

It would help your battery life anyway.

Get it and see if it helps.

 

Hmm what do you mean by 'power outage killing GPU's' ?

But the crashing is not just limited to CPU intensive games, as I stated at the start of this thread it is clearly a GPU related problem, if I turn VPU recover on, VPU recover constantly resets the GPU. If it is off there is just a straight out freeze and Microsoft details that it was a problem with the display driver that caused the error on restart.

What I cant understand is if the GPU was damaged why does it let me play games at all? Why not just not work period? Why let me play for 10 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour before crapping out?

 

Your video card drivers may be corrupt or otherwise incompatible. Remove your current video drivers (you will revert to really crappy VGA mode), use CCleaner to get rid of whatever is left of your old drivers, and install the latest Omega drivers. Let me know if this helps.

 

I want to thankyou all for you input and help (especially you gatordude123)! I tore out the ATI Acer drivers and installed the latest Omega Drivers and the problem appears to have been fixed!!

I have just finished stress testing the computer with 3D Mark 2001, Far Cry, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Battlefield Vietnam. Running each game for approx half an hour with NO VPU recovers, no glitches, no hitches! Everything worked as it should... finally.

Lets just hope it stays this way... thanks again and may the sun shine on you all!

 

Well I'm back...

The crashes have continued even with the Omega Drivers. So I decided to just bite the bullet and reinstall... I thought that would fix everything but no!!

The crashes / freezes are back even though the computer is back to basically factory settings!! I am at my wits end, I have no idea what to do other than get rid of this notebook.

As you know I have tried everything and the only thing I can think of that may be causing the crashes is the fact that after I installed XP using Acer's stupid recovery cd's I was left with a FAT 32 filing system on my HDD so I converted using XP's convert system in the command prompt to NTFS.

Is there any way that the conversion could be making my games freeze?? Please help, any input appreciated.

 

I don't think so. Have you tried checking your hard drive for bad sectors and other problems? HDTune has a test that can be run:
http://www.hdtune.com/

We can safely conclude that, since you did a reformat and are still running into the same problems, that there is a physical problem with the machine. Does the thing still have a warranty on it?

 

yup


I can OC fine with cat 6.8's!