Help with Video Card Issue

[dpc5555]

Hello,

I've been having a strange problem with my Geforce GTS 250 video card, and I can't seem to find an answer.

A few months back, I got a computer virus and decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall windows. After updating the nvidia drivers, I started having a problem where windows would completely freeze up, though the sound would still work as normal. After doing a hard reboot, I would get to the welcome screen in Windows 7, and it would simply stop and not load windows.

Safe mode is still usable, and rolling back the driver to the stock windows 7 video card driver would make everything work normal again.

I tried using older nVidia drivers, but they all do the same thing. Tried contacting PNY, who made the card, but I get not response from them.

Here are my specs:
Windows 7 64 bit
CPU: Phenom II X4 3.0
GPU: Geforce GTS 250
Memory 4GB
CPU: 450w Corsair (I just ordered at 750, to see if that would help)

I don't see evidence of overheating - this problem happens randomly (not only during gaming) and my temps are the 40 range at idle and upper 50s low 60s at load. My logs point to the nVidia driver as "stopped responding".

Its strange that using the base Windows driver (Microsoft WDDM 1.1) runs perfectly fine, including during heavy gaming, which makes me think this is not a hardware issue.

Any ideas of why that driver may work, but nVidia drivers do not?

Thank you in advance!!

 

[borisof007]

Sounds like a driver issue unfortunately.

I would make sure to use Driversweeper to remove any and ALL video card drivers, then try reinstalling the stock drivers your video card came with. Barring that, you'll have to repeat this process with known stable drivers until you find something that works. Or your card's wonky.

 

[ilysaml]

why don't you try to update you're video card driver through the windows update system ?

 

[dpc5555]

Thanks for the responses!

Unfortunately I had tried Driversweeper, but it didn't help. I had started with the most current driver on the nVidia site and worked backwards, but they all caused the freezing problem.

If it helps, it didn't always happen immediately. The most current didn't even need to freeze, it locked things up after restarting the system from the install. The older ones worked for a little while, then froze.

I also had tried going through Windows Update, hoping those drivers would be more suited for the system, but same deal, it locked up after restarting.

Is it possible that the drivers are somehow incompatible with the drivers of something else on my system? It was strange, prior to the OS reinstall when these problems started, everything had worked fine with current drivers for the previous year or so.

I believe I had also tried doing a second reinstall right after the fact (I hadn't loaded all my software yet when this started, so it was an easy thing to try), but the problem persisted.

I'm stumped. I suppose it could be the card (LOL an excuse to upgrade!) but it's odd that it works without issue with that particular Windows driver

 

[dpc5555]

An update -

This ended up being a hardware issue. Replacing the card fixed the problem