Fix for nVidia “Driver has stopped responing”

In the coming weeks two giant FPS games will be released; The incredible “Battlefield 3″ from DiCE Sweden and the latest incarnation in the Call of Duty series; “Modern Warfare 3″.

I’ve been using a Radeon card but decided to switch with my son as his PSU wasn’t sufficient to run his nVidia 260 GTX.

But lo an behold as the new card caused me the dreaded TDR (Timeout Detection & Recovery) error; the screen would freeze, sometimes for a couple of seconds and at times forcing me to do a hard reset. The former prompting a “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered”

Display driver stopped responding and has been recovered

This is a well known problem that has plagued thousands of Windows Vista and Windows 7 (I am on Win7 x64) users.

Suggestions for fixing this issue are various, ranging from editing the registry, faulty PSU’s, bad RAM or overheating.

None of them worked for me… until I stumbled upon an obscure post (unfortunately I cannot remember the original URL).

The suggestion was to use an nNvidia tweaking utility called “PowerMizer Manager” found here:

http://somemorebytes.com/wp/index.php/software/nvpmmanager/

The operational procedure for fixing this issue for me was very easy: Just run the program and set to “[fixed performance level]” with the setting as shown in the image below [Max. Perf / Min. PowerSave]

nVidia TDR fix

I hope this post will be helpful to some of you experiencing this annoying problem. But a disclaimer is that you do this at your own peril.

Fingers crossed my computer’s been up and running for 24h now without any problem.

MSN Live login problem fix

Diverting from my photos; My son had problems logging into Windows messenger – and after quite a struggle I found a solution that I thought I’d share with you all. (My payback to all internet users who invest time and effort trying to help other users)

First, I tried a few tips found on the net (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-95438_35_0.html , http://messenger-support.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!1pUFzGgzjAV-OT0jri_AqaGw!1070.entry ) to no avail. (Although the mentioned solutions seems to have worked for quite a few users)

In our case it turned out to be the Time and date settings in Windows Vista that was out of sync and that the fix was quite easy: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/sync-your-clock-with-internet-time-servers-from-the-vista-command-prompt/.

Bear in mind that I had previously read about the time/messenger issue but I had tried manually adjusting the time (not syncing it) without any effect.

Laperm cat kitten , S * ÄgirsHus BC Freke