x205-sli1 video card problem

Hi, I'm having a problem with my 8600M GT video cards. Bioshock and the Witcher were running great until Tuesday night and I just bought the laptop on Monday. On Tuesday (I downloaded Bioshock v.1.10 and my frame rate dropped really far) and by Wednesday I couldn't even play it at the lowest settings at the lowest resolution without fps lag.

I keep getting a video driver shut down but restarted message. I don't remember what the complete message said, but it was along those lines. I also got an explorer.exe error when I shut down the computer on Monday. I haven't gotten that since, though, so I didn't get a chance to write down exactly what it said.

I ran 3dmark06 and the test results were better with sli enabled than disabled.

SLI enabled: 6986
SLI disabled: 4209

I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool and that didn't have any negative results.

I updated Vista and downloaded hotfixes.

I, also, updated the video card drivers to 169.09

I read a couple different forums to try to find a fix.
One of which was http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=199326

 

Is your Sli enabled? Battery set at high performance? Check device manager and both display adapters working? Run 3DMark again see if there is a diff.

 

SLI is enabled. Battery is set at high performance. Both Display adapters seem to be working. 3d Mark score was not different.

I'm thinking about reinstalling Bioshock because I read somewhere that the new patch can decrease performance. I wasn't sure if that was only on the xbox360 version or both, since it didn't really say.

Maybe I should try running The Witcher in DX9 mode? I don't know how to do that, though.

 

SLI 6986? Are you overclocking? Still running Vista or reformated with XP?

Just wondering, because I bought a SLi3 and the best 3dMark score I've had is 6732. I'm still running Vista Ultimate and have only disabled unused services or uninstalled apps I never planned on using.

 

Which patch are you using? Use the "World wide retail" patch not the ""English/German" version for Bioshock. Also the Witcher has a patch out that will give a big improvement .

 

@ Snowsurfer: The Witcher runs fine now with the new patch, except for the crashing part.

Bioshock runs well now, too.

@Alondrix: I'm not sure what SLI 6986 means. I am running Vista Home Premium... really thinking about going back to XP, though... and no I'm not OC'ing.

Question: If I go back to XP what drivers should I use? I don't see any drivers (touchpad, etc.) for XP and I read that you have to slipstream the sata drivers into the Windows XP disk which I have no idea how to do.

 

I just deciphered Alondrix's message and he said your 3Dmark of 6986 is better than his 6732 with his SLi3 and he is bummed, thinks your overclocking your 8600GT's. Glad your games are running better. Do a good defrag on your hard drives might help.

 

Is it possible to do a dual boot (XP and Vista) using the restore disk that came with my laptop?

I'm tired of having to replay some of the parts of The Witcher and heard that it ran better on XP.

I also keep on getting the display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered... I thought it was fixed, but I guess not... and I heard that running games in XP takes care of that problem. Is that true or am I going to have to send my laptop to Toshiba and have them fix it?

 

I'd post a new thread in the gaming section of this forum, with the title of "Witcher crashing" or something like that, I'am sure others are having the same problems, it's most likely the game. Is Bioshock running well? It sounds stupid but defrag. your HD's, installing new games can really mess up your HD"s. I had some game problems and found out my drive C was 35% defragmented.

 

According to posts Vista is what makes The Witcher crash, which is why I'm wondering if I can make a dual boot system (XP and Vista) with the restore disk that came with my x205-sli1. Last time I played Bioshock it was running well.

 

Okay, so I found out why the Witcher runs poorly sometimes... it's because of the "display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered" thing. I ran with Fraps on and got about 30-40 FPS in The Witcher at 1440x900 with settings turned to medium (occasionally my fps went down to 2, but that was when my hard drive started accessing something I think since the little red light was blinking). Once the display driver error happened I was down to 14-15 fps.

I haven't played Bioshock long enough to see if the display driver error comes up.

 

Since you reinstalled your video driver, maybe a corrupt install. Didn't notice if you mentioned having problems with any other games. If so, it may be worth reinstalling your video card driver. However, if you do it again, I would recommend that you uninstall, run Driver Sweeper (free) or Driver Cleaner (minimal cost) from safeboot mode to make sure all of the driver is gone, and hen reinstall.

Also, If you have not done so already, you should really post your problem about the Witcher at http://www.thewitcher.com/forum/index.php?board=14.0. Folks on that board are very helpful. Chances are the issue may be resolvable.

Also, check to ensure you have Vista compatibility patches installed. http://www.nvidia.com/object/windows_vista_hotfixes.html. The 940105 update helped for me.

No, I don't believe this. I'm running the Witcher on a desktop machine and a stock Toshiba x205-sli3 laptop. Both systems are running 169.09 drivers (albiet the laptop has laptopvideo2go modded drivers) and Vista Ultimate. Other than some occasional slowdowns on the laptop, I haven't had any major problems. Though, I have used a few tweaks on recommendation from the Witcher board I posted above to get everything to work.

Most of the problems that are posted on the Witcher board are typically underpowered systems that don't meet the min requirements to play the game or misconfigured systems.

 

Thanks. I'll give this a try.

Are you running in SLI mode when you play The Witcher?

 

Yes, I am in SLI mode.

 

Okay, well I'm pretty sure SLI caused the problem for me. I played it with it off and no display driver error.

Now I have a new problem, when I tried booting up my laptop last night Vista took around 20 minutes to load and every time I try to use Vista it takes about the same time. Now I opened up Task Manager and it said that Vista is using 1.95 - 1.99 gb of ram and that's with no applications running and just a few processes (since most take forever to load and I'm not patient enough to have them all load)... nothing looks out of the ordinary so I'm not sure what it is... I ran memory test thinking that maybe it was a memory error, but nothing showed up bad...

Once I did let it load and it was running okay I let Kapersky run and it didn't find any viruses. I also looked at the problem report tool and it said that vsmon hanged and true vector stopped working. Then when I tried starting Zone Alarm it wouldn't load.

I've had some problems before where applications would stop responding (mostly firefox) or hang for a couple of seconds. I'm wondering if I have a bad piece of hardware somewhere.

I'm going to take it over to my brother's later and see if he can fix it... I might just format my hard drives and go to XP and see if that takes care of the problem... or at least do a system recovery using the recovery disk.

 

I have been researching the "display driver nvlddmkm " this error for about 6 weeks since I got my notebook. It went away with I believe the 169.12 drivers. There also are 2 other issues I found; a hotfix for dual SLI GPUS that you have to take from MS as beta and sign-up; and there's talk about a problem with the drivers install; where a version file doesn't get updated when you install drivers, and it causes the error. My seems to got fixed after removing all drivers with Drive Cleaner in safe mode; and re-installing. The problem I am now having is while the modifed drivers fixed my games; they broke the HDDVD player; because windows recognizes a modified inf file;and blocks HDDVD with it's newer copy protection. So I have only found The original bad Toshiba drivers, that work for HD. Don't think Toshiba tech support can help; they wanted to have me re-image my disk and restore the system to factory condition:-(

 

I installed 169.28 and ran driver sweeper as well. No problems yet. I'm going to reapply the hotfix if the problem occurs again. I don't bother calling tech support because most of the things they tell me are things I've already done.