New NP9262 Freezes...

I got my son a NP9262 for Christmas, with 9800M GTX in SLI and the Quad 9550. When he is in Steam games, the system will freeze up occasionally, as well as when he exits the game. Does anybody know if there are issues with Steam on this laptop?

 

Are there any relevant entries in the system's event logs that might give us a better idea of what's causing the problem?

 

I did not see anything when I looked last week....I did turn the auto reboot on bluescreen off so that I could get an error message, but it has not blue screened since then...only stutters / freezes when in the games and when exiting the game. I did see something about realtek and steam when doing a search...will look into that next. I am running a memtest right now and so far have not seen any problems with the 4gb of memory.

 

Typically, a stutter/freeze condition is caused by problems with the video drivers, usually because either the driver itself is corrupted, or there's a conflict with something else - usually that something else is monopolizing the FSB for too long, causing everything else to back up.

One utility you might try to see if you can pinpoint any apps with too much latency is the DPC latency checker, which is designed to try and identify which processes are making deferred procedure calls (DPCs) that are suffering from too much latency.

The other thing you might try is disabling the bluetooth driver - if the bluetooth driver is loaded and executing, it will monopolize the FSB every time it polls for available bluetooth devices to connect to and, if there isn't anything around for it to be looking for, it may take quite a while for each polling attempt to finish up.

 

Thanks for the info...I have disabled the Bluetooth adapter (we don't have any bluetooth devices here at home) and then ran latency checker...it did not see anything. I am going to try some games and see if it is fixed now.

 

what driver are you running?

 

Just a guess but it might be the Nvidia SLI driver you're using, my buddy had the same problem sometime ago and reverted back to a more stable one.

Does it do it with all steam games? I've generally had very good luck with the Steam app and Games on it.

Also not all games get along with SLI or even utilized it, but things aren't nearly quite as bad as when it launched. I think your issue is driver related or at least with a certain steam game/game.

 

Am using 179.28 from the nvidia site.

 

Still having issues....after disabling the blue tooth adapter and running Memtest86+ for one pass, things seemed to run ok. However, after my son had been using the laptop for a couple of hours (doing Left 4 Dead), when he exited the desktop icons had disappeared, but the task and start bar were still there. Internet explorer did work, however, a little while later when he moved the mouse the system blue screened with a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL message and Windows stopped. I have a call into PowerNotebooks Tech support at this time. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do to correct?

 

did you get these problems with the stock drivers?

 

My son said that the screen would freeze (or lag) at different times when playing games. I upgraded the drivers to try to fix the problem...but could go back to the stock drivers to see if the problem still persists.

 

I saw another post when searching google...it said that the problem may be with the virtual memory....according to the article, I should go and change my virtual memory to No paging file...reboot and then set it back up again as System Managed size...does that sound correct?

 

we would need to go back to full stock video drivers first. i know they aren't the best for gaming, but we are looking to see if it's stable doing all the other things. then we can get to trying to update the drivers again.

anything is possible and worth a try...

 

Ok...I am assuming that the Sager drivers cd that came with the system will have the driver that shipped on the system. Should I just boot into safe mode and delete the video card, then reboot and install the old drivers? Or do I use Driver Cleaner and then install the old driver?

 

which ever way you feel comfortable with.
you can use the safe mode driver cleaner method.