Hey guys, i've been having some problems gaming of late. Recently i started getting the dreaded "display driver has stopped responding" error. As soon as it started, every game i opened would give this error and the monitor would go into powersave mode. Occasionally the PC would restart itself through it, but mostly i could just ctrl+alt+del to shut down the app causing it and the desktop would be fine.
I tried everything i could think of, replaced all the cables in the PC (except the Pcie ones, only 2 came with the PSU and both are needed for the GPU) updated all drivers on the PC, including trying every Nvidia one i could lay my hands on and yeah i always use a drivercleaner in safe mode between nvidia driver uninstall and installs. I reseated the GPU and changed the cable over to its second output. Ran chkdsk on the hard drive. I even tried to reformat windows, but the PC won't let me. around 30% into it loading up the setup files it was giving an IO error suggesting it something was up with my hard drive or dvd drive, both are fine.
The desktop was mostly fine but would occasionally go a few wonky colours if i'd been trying repeatedly to get a game to start.
On friday a friend happened to suggest my sound card, my sound card is built into my motherboard so i hadn't considered that. The minute i disabled it in the device manage games worked absolutely fine, so i rebooted and disabled the bios from automatically detecting the azalia codec. The PC ran absolutely fine all weekend after having done this.
Last night out of the blue though, it started happening again. This time enabling or disabling the sound card doesn't seem to make a difference. I do hear clicks in the headset and ventrilo kinda stutters when for example i open a new tab in firefox, or refresh a webpage, not all the time just some of the time. That never used to happen before all these problems started.
So now i'm at an impasse and stumped on what to try next, hence posting here for some advice. the obvious problem is the graphics card, but i'm broke right now and can't afford another to replace it when i don't even know it's 100% that that is broken. So some advice on what to test or how to test my compnonents would be very much appreciated.
specs are :
8800GTX, DS3-965P Mobo, 4GB G.Skill ram (2x2), seagate barracuda 250GB HD, Vista 64 Ultimate.
Edit - Oh and when this problem appeared again last night i had to hard reset the PC, the loading screen that lists all the hardware etc had horizontal white lines on it and the PC restarted itself a few times before getting to windows.
I tried everything i could think of, replaced all the cables in the PC (except the Pcie ones, only 2 came with the PSU and both are needed for the GPU) updated all drivers on the PC, including trying every Nvidia one i could lay my hands on and yeah i always use a drivercleaner in safe mode between nvidia driver uninstall and installs. I reseated the GPU and changed the cable over to its second output. Ran chkdsk on the hard drive. I even tried to reformat windows, but the PC won't let me. around 30% into it loading up the setup files it was giving an IO error suggesting it something was up with my hard drive or dvd drive, both are fine.
The desktop was mostly fine but would occasionally go a few wonky colours if i'd been trying repeatedly to get a game to start.
On friday a friend happened to suggest my sound card, my sound card is built into my motherboard so i hadn't considered that. The minute i disabled it in the device manage games worked absolutely fine, so i rebooted and disabled the bios from automatically detecting the azalia codec. The PC ran absolutely fine all weekend after having done this.
Last night out of the blue though, it started happening again. This time enabling or disabling the sound card doesn't seem to make a difference. I do hear clicks in the headset and ventrilo kinda stutters when for example i open a new tab in firefox, or refresh a webpage, not all the time just some of the time. That never used to happen before all these problems started.
So now i'm at an impasse and stumped on what to try next, hence posting here for some advice. the obvious problem is the graphics card, but i'm broke right now and can't afford another to replace it when i don't even know it's 100% that that is broken. So some advice on what to test or how to test my compnonents would be very much appreciated.
specs are :
8800GTX, DS3-965P Mobo, 4GB G.Skill ram (2x2), seagate barracuda 250GB HD, Vista 64 Ultimate.
Edit - Oh and when this problem appeared again last night i had to hard reset the PC, the loading screen that lists all the hardware etc had horizontal white lines on it and the PC restarted itself a few times before getting to windows.
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