Windows 7 Freezes - possible fix

I have been struggling with Windows 7 for about a week. Initially I was getting the black screen. Sometimes parts of the screen would show if I moved the mouse around. The problems seemed to happen a lot when running setup programs to install the various software I need to do my work - all Microsoft stuff like Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.

I replaced my video drivers a bunch of times and after getting the latest NVidia driver to install (using Vista compatability and running as administrator) it seemed to get better but every 10 minutes or so the system would lockup/freeze for 5 minutes before becoming responsive again.

I noticed that the problem happened when moving or resizing a window - any window including IE, Windows Explorer, and Task Manager.

I read other posts about adjusting the power settings for the video card - I set the power Options to High performance but the problems continued.

Finally I decided to change the desktop theme since it has some fancy shading, transparency, and animation features. Right click the desktop and click Personalize. I chose the Windows 7 Basic theme and used a solid color as my Desktop Background.

I have not had a problem for several hours so I'm hoping that this will let me work without lockups until the drivers are updated and fix these issues. I still see some trailing problems when moving windows around but it doesn't cause the system to freeze so I can live with that for now.

Here are some details about my hardware and installation:

Clean install - not an upgrade
System: DELL 690 Precision WorkstationOS: Windows 7 Enterprise N 64-bit CPU: Dual Intel Xeon 5148 2.33 MHz (dual core) Motherboard: Intel 5000X Series Chipset Memory: 8 GB Graphics Card(s): NVidia Quadro FX 3400/4400 Sound Card: SigmaTel Monitor(s) Displays: BenQ FP222W Hard Drives: 3 x 146 GB SAS with PERC 6/i RAID Adapter Level 5
I hope this information is helpful to those of you still having these problems.

I have a very similar workstation setup with Windows 7 Pro x64 (clean install) that has the exact same symptoms as yours. I have a suspicion that the old Quadro FX 3400/4400 card is causing the problems. I did the same as you, set my desktop theme to basic, and that did help, but the overall performance and system stability is no where it should be. In the next couple of days, I will be trying a Quadro FX 580 video card to see if that solves the problem.

Lenovo Thinkstation D10
2x Xeon E5405
8 Gb ECC memory
Quadro FX 4400
2x Samsung 64Gb SLC SSD RAID 0
Win 7 Pro x64

That's weird that they don't list the 3400/4400 there because the latest drivers (191.66) explicity states that it is for Windows 7.

It might just be a matter of time before they get all of the bugs worked out of the driver.

My system has not had a freeze or lockup since I changed the desktop theme so I'm just going to check for updates periodically.

I had similar issues, not 100% fixed, but MUCH better.

These drivers came out today:

NVIDIA DRIVERS 196.75 WHQL

I have installed windows 7 ultimate 32-bit but it constantly stop working every 5 min. i turn on my computer.
Please help
here is my spec.
Foxconn 945 motherbord
DDR2 2GB Apacer
Processor PIV 3.4GHz
VGAnBoard + nVidia 7300 LE

PLEASE HELP I LIKE WIN 7 SO MUCH

My experience has been that these cards have some sort of incompatibility, they totally choke on Windows 7. I ran a benchmark program and they perform very, very poorly on Windows 7, I can't help but wonder it they can have any other affects on the system or not.