Nvidia driver crash frequently all of a sudden

Laptop in my sig. Been using 344.80 driver for quite awhile with no issue. Yesterday, I could not get media player classic to play an mkv file. I tried the same file with VLC and it worked perfectly fine. Since then, I keep getting "Nvidia kernal mode driver crashed and recovered" message. The easiest way to trigger the crash is with youtube, since about half the video I randomly select will cause it to happen. I've never had any driver issues until yesterday. No program nor Windows update was installed yesterday. It appears after media player classic refused to play the mkv file my problems started to happen.

I uninstalled 344.80, updated to 350.12 and the same thing still happens. I then reinstalled Win 8.1 with 344.80 and the same thing still happens. It's like all of a sudden youtube videos are crashing the nvidia drivers. Not only that, even Warcraft III will crash the driver but games like Far Cry 4 and Path of Exile play perfectly fine on maximum settings. Temperature is same as before, 75-85C underload.

I searched around and it appears this issue of constant crash dates back several years with a multitude of possible solutions. I tried all of the suggestions posted on the Nvidia forum but nothing has worked. So in one day my drivers simply decided to start crashing.

Some information I found:

1.

Spoiler

will almost always guarantee to crash the driver in Chrome. If I let the forum embed this video my driver will crash when I view this post. The video will try to load and get stuck then the display driver crashes. I thought maybe it's flash plug-in so I disable it. Disabling allows some video to play but it does not get rid of the crash. Even visiting adobe's website can crash the driver. I tried Hulu and it does not crash the driver. I tried Firefox and it can crash the driver when I try to load any video, just not as frequently as Chrome.
2. I thought a clean install would fix the problem but it didn't. So does this mean there is something wrong with my hardware? Why would intensive games not crash but certain video streams will? Media Player Classic will not work at all on the clean install, it will crash the driver with any video.

Has anyone encountered this issue and found a solid solution? I've attached the Windows Event Viewer log for reference.

 

If you are getting the same issues with multiple driver versions, I would also suggest running driver sweeper. Once that is done try the original Nvidia drivers that came with the computer. Once you verify those do not cause any crashes then updated the the latest ones and see how that goes.

 

I had crash issues at some point, and the prevailing answer I got on the internet was that I had a virus that was hijacking my cuda cores to mine bit coins (brilliant really....). I couldn't go 10 minutes without it crashing, and loading up Chrome was the fastest way to trigger it.

I did a whole slew of cleaning/scanning/re-installing, but at the end of the day, it was cat hair built up in my fans =p.

 

Thanks for all the response. I noticed the GPU would go into high performance mode even if my machine was idling, never happened before. I reinstalled Win 7 and used the modded inf from laptopvideo2go instead of modding my own inf. Everything appears normal right now. The problematic youtube videos play fine and the GPU stays in idle like it's suppose to. I will clean my GPU fans again. Thanks everyone for the helpful tips. I'm not ready to upgrade to a new machine yet, no reason to really

 

Could have been the virus mentioned so the clean install was a good idea. A repaste might be a good idea too if you are up for it.

 

I did a fresh install of Win8 before installing Win7 and the persisted. There were some dust in the heatsink but nothing causing blockage. However, now my cpu idles at 65C instead of the normal 40C....I really hate this

 

What did you do to the cpu heatsink itself?

 

Nothing. I didn't touch it nor remove it, just blew some dust out. I just re-pasted the CPU right now and the same thing happens. CPU idles at 60C while GPU is at 35C.

Edit: I figured it out. It was the Windows Indexing service that's making the CPU heat up. Even at 14% CPU usage it managed to get the CPU close to 70C after awhile. I think the Clevo fan profile is tied to CPU usage so it doesn't spin up until the CPU is too hot from the "low usage".

 

No, it's tied to temps, I can guarantee that. But the default trip-off for high temps is "70c" when the fan spins a bit faster. Less-than-silent fans are ~50c or so, but you won't get anything worth its salt in cooling until 70c. I used to run my machine 24/7 max fans so it never bothered me, but that kind of stuff can happen (and it is annoying). You'll be like, idling and a virus scan will murder your SSD or something and BAM hot CPU. My friend with MSI has it worse. If she leaves her PC idle overnight on low fans she'll wake up and it'll have hit like 89c overnight for some reason and we have no idea what. She ended up limiting clockspeeds to 1.6GHz when she goes to sleep.

 

I'm not going to try to fix this anymore. Installed Win8.1 again, driver 350.12 crashes all the time. Went back to Win7, driver 344.65 will not crash with Chrome but crashes non-stop with Firefox. There are some bad interaction between Windows, Flash, and Nvidia driver and I can't figure out the definitive cause.

 

Honestly, there is a very real chance your 680M is on its last legs.