Ok, here's the situation...I'm happily playing Battlefield 2 / COD1, then suddenly, out of the blue, my primary display (I have two) will go onto power save, as if my vid card is no longer outputting to it. If my second monitor is in use, this will normally stay on however. It's a wierd situation, because the PC will not respond to the usual Ctrl-Alt-Del, or any other keyboard command I can think of to close an offending program. The lockup will normally be accompanied by the default windows error 'bong' a few seconds after the lockup occurs. And if I'm listening to internet radio (which I frequently do while playing BF2), after the lockup, this will start to stutter, until it eventually stops, about 10secs after the lockup. Another interesting observation is that if the game has background music (eg. COD1 will normally have the sound of artillery guns playing on a loop in the background), this will usually continue, even after the lockup.
I sometimes get these windows error sound beeps randomly while playing these games, but there is no associated problem, so I just ignore them, unless the mentioned lockup occurs. But there really seems to be no pattern at all. The lockups are completely random, and since I can't seem to find a way to recover from them (even though they are seemingly software-based), I have to hard-reboot. To give an example, yesterday I played COD1 a lot in the morning, 3hrs maybe. During this time I did not have a single lock-up. However, after a while one did occur, at which point I rebooted and restarted COD1. It locked up again after about 5mins of play. I rebooted again, and had another go at firing up COD1. This time it played fine for the rest of the day without a problem.
Can anyone help with this as I'm completely baffled?
I sometimes get these windows error sound beeps randomly while playing these games, but there is no associated problem, so I just ignore them, unless the mentioned lockup occurs. But there really seems to be no pattern at all. The lockups are completely random, and since I can't seem to find a way to recover from them (even though they are seemingly software-based), I have to hard-reboot. To give an example, yesterday I played COD1 a lot in the morning, 3hrs maybe. During this time I did not have a single lock-up. However, after a while one did occur, at which point I rebooted and restarted COD1. It locked up again after about 5mins of play. I rebooted again, and had another go at firing up COD1. This time it played fine for the rest of the day without a problem.
Can anyone help with this as I'm completely baffled?
I wasn't even in-game...I was on the menu in BF2. However, the BSOD highlighted the problem as being something to do with 'nv4_disp.dll' which I believe is a component of my NVIDIA display driver? I'm kinda starting to think this may be something to do with having dual displays, although I cannot see any reason why this would cause a problem. Either way, I'm gonna take a look to see if there are any new drivers from NVIDIA and take it from there.