Video Driver Vista Woes
Technology March 26th, 2007Dion and I are at the Microsoft Technical Summit (MTS07) this week, Microsoft’s annual event for reaching out to the non-MSFT types. We’ll be posting entries here and there as interesting stuff comes up. But since I’m at Redmond, its only appropriate to blog about Vista.
I finally figured out why my Vista box was blue-screening multiple times a day: the video driver. Vista kindly informed me after reboot number fifty-something that the crash was related to a deadlock in the video driver. Windows update said I had the latest nVidia driver, but sure enough, when I visited the nVidia support website, I found I was several versions behind.
Happily, after updating to the latest nVidia driver (I felt brave and went with the beta they have posted) my system has been very stable.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
[…] Signs of the demise of my Vista box blue-screening multiple times a day have been greatly exaggerated. After upgrading to nVidia’s latest drivers, the problem has not in fact gone away, despite the longest respite to date right after the install (>24 hours). Upon returning after a trip, the system had blue-screened (and reported the video driver as the culprit) and it has since rebooted three times in less than 24 hours giving the same error. […]
April 2nd, 2007 at 7:37 am
[…] I’ve recently been whining about Vista blue-screening on me. Just after wiping it off the affected system, Tim Heuer from Microsoft offered to help me troubleshoot the problem. After re-installing and having another few blue-screens, I passed him the MEMORY.DMP files (~150 MB each via TransferBigFiles.com, a great free service). And guess what he found? […]