Video Driver Vista Woes
Dion 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.
[...] 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. [...]
Ben Galbraith’s Blog » Blog Archive » The Wow Stopped Here
March 29, 2007 at 7:05 pm
[...] 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? [...]
Ben Galbraith’s Blog » Blog Archive » Vista Problem Solved, Sort Of
April 2, 2007 at 7:37 am