Thursday, April 21, 2011

Display driver stopped responding and has recovered.

Got up this morning and went to check my email and found this message on the action bar that the display driver had stopped and has recovered and something about NDIVIA (?) Sorry but I can't find the message on my machine. HP Pavilion p6242f Desktop, Windows 7, 64 bit, just over a year old. I have never seen this before; it couldn't be related to the huge Windows updates released this week,could it?

Any help appreciated.

JenAnne, Victoria, BC, Canada

Reply 1 : Display driver stopped responding and has recovered.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and it's happened to me a couple of times. I don't get Bob's XP claim though.

NVidia is your video or graphics card inside the computer. It uses drivers, (small operating system files), and sometimes they fail temporarily for any reason.

Windows 7 is far better than previous Windows OS versions in that it can do this, recover from such temporary glitches. It's a bit scary when it happens, but as Windows users we get used to these things.

It is unlikely to be related to any Windows updates, except for one possibility. Windows Updates will often offer us updated drivers for our hardware. The recommendation is, do not allow Windows to update drivers! Microsoft doesn't do drivers very well at all and we are better leaving those alone and if need be, seek updates for such things from the hardware makers web sites themselves.

But even then, we don't update drivers unless and until something needs them. It's the old maxim, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

So, the best advice at the moment is, see how it goes. If it happens again soon then come back here, but hopefully it won't happen too often.

Hope that helps.

Mark

Reply 2 : Display driver stopped responding and has recovered.

Picture at http://i175.photobucket.com/albums/w146/rproffitt2000/DriverFailCapture.jpg

I've seen this 2 times on that machine and given the rare occurrence my thought is to log it and move on. However some folk can't do that.
Bob

Reply 3 : Display driver stopped responding and has recovered.

Thanks; I feel better now.

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