Clevo M860TU Graphics Driver Issues?

Hi,

So I bought my M860TU as part of the initial release cycle batch about two years ago, but lately I've been having some problems. Ever since about 3 weeks ago, I've been experiencing intermittent "freezes" of my computer, where essentially it will just completely lock up. Audio goes into loop, the screen just freezes on whatever frame it was displaying at the time (or often, even midway between frames, resulting in an odd striped appearance) before finally fading out to a single color (not always black or white). The only option to get it working again is a hard reset, whereupon I am told by the bios that "An unexpected shutdown was detected"

I did everything I could think of, even resorting to pulling an HDD from another laptop, wiping it, and using it in my M860 to reinstal Windows 7 x64 from scratch.

After a lot of pain, I've found that the issue seems to be with my NVIDIA drivers. The problem NEVER occurs while in safe mode, or even in safe mode with networking. As a result, I tried simply uninstalling my video drivers altogether, and behold, all of my issues stopped.

So my problem now is that I've gone through pretty much every driver available to me, from the ones on the Sager website for the NP8662 (couldn't find windows 7 64 bit drivers for the 8660, which is actually what my computer is), to the 260.99 drivers from NVIDIA.

I have the 9800M GT in this laptop, so does anyone know of any other options I might try that might not cause whatever software incompatibilities are causing my lockups?

Edit:

I should also mention that I've run exhaustive hardware tests, including stress tests using 3DMark, SiSoft SANDRA, MEMTEST86, and a Video Memory Stress Tester. None of these have yet come up with any errors or caused the computer to exhibit the problematic behavior while running.

 

Personally I would try baking my gfx card. I did it with my 9800m gt and it worked well... Search "baking" and see what turns up

 

I did read up on baking the card... but it doesnt seem like what I have is a hardware problem. I run ubuntu and windows just fine AS LONG AS I don't have my drivers installed (on windows). And even when they are installed, problems are intermittent and occur more often in non-graphics intensive programs (Chrome, MATLAB) than they do while I'm actually gaming.

In addition, running 3DMark06 yeilds no strange results during testing, and through a series of 4 runs I have yet to crash while running it. For these reasons, I'm hesitant to resort to things like baking the card without a definite diagnosis of hardware issues.

 

best driver i found for the 9800GT was 186.81
now running 260.99 with no problems but i still swear by the older card.
if youve tried them then i have no idea.

 

I hadn't actually tried the 186.81, but instead just the 186.03, and then I moved to the drivers on the Sager website, then 260.99, and the beta 266.35, all of which gave me the same problem. So I'll give those a try. I also noticed you were active in the other thread with the borked 9800M GT, so maybe you can help me out.

I'm trying to diagnose for sure whether this is a hardware or software issue. I'm not convinced that it's entirely hardware, simply because of the fact that almost all the other threads that have resulted in sucess with baking have arisen from "won't boot at all" type situations, whereas my laptop is able to boot just fine, and sometimes runs upwards of several hours (even while gaming) before experiencing issues. Also, anytime I load into safe mode, I can run things as long as I want without experiencing any issues.

To me, this seems like a driver problem only, but I'm rather inexperienced, so maybe you could provide a second opinion?

Thanks for the help!

 

ive only learnt what ive picked up on here in the last few years so im no expert really.
if you are getting lots of horizontal or vertical lines across the screen then that sounds like a knakered card and the only option is the baking. if its intermitent it could be the first signs of the card on the way out or it could even be the ribon for the screen it wearing out with the opening and closing of the lid after a couple of years.
if there any way you could post some pictures of the odd stripes then we could be able to advise further.

 

Hey guys! Baking the card was just the trick! After much frustration, and having the computer start degrading to the point where it would freeze less than 10 minutes after boot, I gave up and decided to try baking.

I got a lot of strange looks from my roommate, but that seemed to be just the trick! So if anyone else has a problem like mine, after you exhuast your driver options, try the baking thing.

 

yay, another happy ending.
glad it worked.