Graphics card/driver issue?

in2deep · Post by **in2deep** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 11:25 am

I run BOINC. A short while ago, QMC released a new version of their client. It has a bug in it which does not display the progress, BUT, their new screen saver does - no problem I thought.

Trouble is, when I load the screensaver to look, it "freezes" my machine. I put freezes in quotes, because to an impatient person, that is what would seem to happen. In fact, it slows the system down to a crawl, like it takes 60 seconds to put the task manager up after Ctrl-Alt-Del. When I finally can close the screensaver, the system continues as if nothing had happened.

Now, I joined MalariaControl.net on the 8th March and looked at their screen saver when I did, it worked fine. Other screen savers I have looked at have always worked as well. Now, all projects do the same thing, they "freeze".

Trying to find out what is going on, I discovered that trying to play a DVD through WMP or RealPlayer does the same thing. Again, this was not the case before, but I don't know when it last worked as I don't use that very often.

I have got errors in the event log (000000ea), which relate to threads going into infinite loops in the device driver. I rolled back the driver to an earlier one but this had no effect, so I am back with the newest.

If I turn the hardware accelaration off, BOINC then works, but WMP and RealPlayer still fail, and PowerDVD running standalone gives an error saying it can't run under those settings, (PowerDVD does run standalone now with "full acceleration" enabled).

No hardward has changed. I load the MS patches as and when they appear. I have installed IE7 but removing it had no effect so it is back on.

The card is an NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX/MX400 with the current NVIDIA driver, on an ASUS P4P800S-E MoBo and a 3.2GHz Prescott running XP and DX 9.

Is this sounding familiar to anyone?

konFused · Post by **konFused** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 11:55 am

ehh could be a ram issue maybe one of your sticks is defective...or you might not have enough ram...thats just a thought though...if you have more then one stick of ram try just running with just one stick in at a time and see if that works...good luck

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 11:57 am

Also try reinstalling the old driver without using teh rollback feature.

in2deep · Post by **in2deep** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 1:07 pm

Memtest86 gives the RAM a clean bill of health. Reinstalling last years driver from the download directly made no difference.

konFused · Post by **konFused** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 1:13 pm

well either your display driver is bad....and if that isnt then your video card is bad...

in2deep · Post by **in2deep** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 4:18 pm

well either your display driver is bad....and if that isnt then your video card is bad...

Yet if I set the driver to full accelaration, and run PowerDVD, it runs fine?

konFused · Post by **konFused** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 5:10 pm

well i know the 000000ea means exactly this...

"000000ea = "THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER" - A device driver is spinning in an infinite loop, most likely waiting for hardware to become idle. This usually indicates problem with the hardware itself, or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. In many cases this is the result of a bad video card or a bad display driver."

in2deep · Post by **in2deep** » Fri Jun 02, 2006 6:56 pm

Durrrr, yes, I know, I read that, that is why I'd tried the things I'd tried.

It is also why I mentioned that certain advanced graphics operations are working fine!

So what has changed?