Why does this keep happening??

I just can't figure this out. I have an M1530 with a DDR3 8600 card. I play mostly racing games, and for the older games I play like GTR Evolution and GTR2 my laptop is fine. However, no matter what drivers I use, it always seems to stutter, freeze, and then start working again albeit choppy after I've been playing for about 20 minutes or so. That gets VERY frustrating when you're in the middle of a good online race, the game freezes, and then recovers with your car already in the wall missing a wheel. When I leave the game Vista tells me that "your display driver has stopped responding and has recovered". It's also not a temp thing because the max that my card reaches these days is 73 degrees, and this happens with and without overclocking the card with rivatuner. The only way to get games to run smoothly after this happens is to reinstall the drivers, which will lead to another crash after a prolonged period of racing. Why oh why does it happen with every driver though, and only in these 2 games? BF2, CSS, World in Conflict ect. all run without problems. I've tried the official dell drivers, the DOX drivers, the latest from laptop video 2 go, older ones (174.74), I've even had my graphics card and motherboard replaced (twice) as a result of the typical dell heating issues. Can anyone that has this computer or either of these games comment on what drivers you're using and if you've ever experienced something similar?

 

Your card, the 8600, is very prone to failure. It's most likely on it's way out...except it's only crashing on 2 games? You can always try getting the original drivers from the Nvidia website and doing a rollback. Also, do you have the card overclocked at all? And finally, try running those games in compatibility mode, for Windows XP SP2.

 

As I said in the post, I've tried running with and without overclocks and had the same problem, and it has also occurred before and after 2 separate motherboard/gfx card replacements. The one in my laptop now is new as of 4 days ago and yet it still happens. I'll give compatibility mode a shot, maybe that will make a difference? Thanks for the suggestion, I'm also going to update my audio driver just in case that has anything to do with it.

 

My laptop and desktop occasionally seem to get it, on Vista. It seems once you have it, you won't get rid of it.

 

Do you think he should just reinstall Vista? That's a pain.

 

Not yet. I think a reformat should be last resort.

Either that or get Windows 7, lol. I have never had that problem in Windows 7.

 

Well, the driver stopping to respond happened to me as well a few times.
But it was rare.
Had no major issues with it if it occurred during a game, and the game resumed working fine after the recovery was completed (I never experienced performance problems though).

It's possible your gpu is downclocking automatically for some reason.
Several people experienced this issue to my knowledge and the solution they came up for it was to turn off Powermizer if I'm not mistaken.

Perhaps you can try the same thing.

Also ... just how many programs do you have starting up with the OS and running in the background?
It's possible that some of those are slowing things down (bloatware has a tendency of doing that).

 

what drivers are you using?
i used to have a 8600gs on my older hp dv9700
i stuck with dox's 169.xx drivers for the longest time.
the newer drivers wont do you any good anyways as most of its benefits are for the newer cards.
also you could try to uninstall your driver, goto safe mode and do a clean uninstall with driver sweeper.
after that install/reinstall your driver using normal mode.

 

I mostly use DOX's 185.85 drivers.
They give me best results performance wise and I never really experienced issues with them to begin with.

The only downside of those drivers is that flash videos aren't being routed to the GPU ... but I haven't really seen overall benefits that would make me abandon the higher game/3ds max performance.

 

I'm currently using DOX 185.85 actually. Every time I reinstall drivers I do the whole proper cleaning procedure with going into safe mode and running driver sweeper , so that shouldn't be an issue. I'll give the powermizer disabling a shot, because if I look at the graph of the GPU clocks before and after the driver stops responding, the clocks drop off from their stock performance levels to whatever they are when the laptop is idling normally. It seems like that won't help the problem though, as when the driver stops responding and recovers, I no longer have the option to overclock in Rivatuner, as if the driver is no longer working at all. As for bloatware, I constantly clean things up and monitor my startup/background programs to keep things fast, and I make sure everything that can be closed is closed before I game. It's just so strange to me that this only happens in the GTR games, and it seems to be regardless of what settings I use in game for video options (resolution, AA, textures, ect.). Oh well, I know that this card will melt again just like the last 2 at some point, and when that happens Dell will replace this laptop with something newer and probably with an ATI card so this will in theory be in the past.

 

what about your audio drivers?
maye you need to update them?

 

I'm using the latest audio drivers that are on the Dell website for the M1530, but those haven't been changed since 2008 so perhaps there is a newer driver I should find somewhere else? I don't know much about audio drivers though so I'm hesitant to install anything else...

 

Dan,
Contact dell, they'll give you a replacement computer.
8600mGT is factory faulty.
I went through 2.5 years with the same crap
5~6 mobo/heantsink exchange and still happens.
I have a SXPS 16 now...

You'll probably get one too.... with an ATi 4670 or 3670...

 

They gave you a replacement and let you keep your M1530 as well?? That seems a little crazy, though it'd be nice!

 

Yep, I have the replacement in the box still... planning to sell it... they transferred the warranty over to the 1640...

I'm typing from my 1530...
I live in Honduras, so they just shipped the 1640 to a package mailbox I have over @ Miami, that gets sent here...


BUT, I'm waiting for them to say something like "z0mG, gimme back our 1530"...

I'm honestly moving on from the mid-range systems Dell offers... and getting a GX640...

 

Interesting, let me know if they ever call you to ask for your old laptop back! Did they send you a replacement without waiting for the GPU to fail again? I was told by the tech last week that they'd give me a newer laptop if/when this one fails again, but that would make this one a dead brick essentially, but yours apparently is still working?