Constant black screen when playing games

Hey,

I'm kinda in need of desperate help to point me in the right direction to get my issue sorted as around a week ago have been playing this particular game, World of Warcraft.. runs perfectly fine on my machine. Until today, i just keep getting a black screen after about 5 - 10 minutes of actually playing the game itself.

I updated the video card drivers, still same issue. Although once the black screen decides to come on during a game you cannot hear nothing it's as if the screen and laptop has switched itself off. I tried playing another game, left 4 dead (previously used to work too) and same problem arose with that also.

The only thing that differed from a week ago would have been windows 7 updates so i uninstalled those but no joy either and did a system restore point back to several weeks ago an still no luck. Any ideas?

Any ideas? I really need help on this one, searched throughout google to help with this problem but no joy on fixing this problem

As I understand things, World of Warcraft is having a few issues. You should read this thread and follow the links inside: http://www.sevenforums.com/gaming/2895-world-warcraft-graphical-problem.html

What graphics card do you have?

ATI 5 series cards are currently having issues

I have ATi Radeon 3200 HD graphics card KremmenUK and thank you Fumz, i'll check the website out

I was having the exact same issue with my new Gateway SX 2802-01 (from Costco), along with the Desktop Icons freezing up after a few minutes and after trying all of the fixes found on this forum, with no sucess, I finally called Costco tech support and he recommended I do an OS recovery. He told me that sometimes when OS's are mass produced on hard drives by the manufactors, some of the OS files will get corrupt causing problems as described in this forum.

Well to make a long story short, I preformed an OS recovery using the Recovery Disc I burned from my Windows 7 OS on the hard drive and it worked. I haven't had any issues with the Desktop Icons freezing up. I believe this will also take care of the Desktop going black after loading a full screen game.

It's probably the driver update for the Radeon 3200 that Windows Update pumped to you. I can't speak for the desktop version of these cards, but the mobile ones are having problems with nearly every driver version. The driver update messed up my graphics on my laptop too (eMachines E627 model). My Windows 7 boot screen would go crazy like the card was about to die (complete distortion with flickering and horizontal lines). I have found 2 fixes that worked for me:

1) Use the Win7 RTM driver that windows uses by default (WDDM 1.1 - driver v8.56.1.15) and prevent Windows Update from automatically installing updates without notification. (I am not recommending you turn off fully automatic updates, but if you want to use the original RTM driver version you have to keep Windows from updating it without notifying you). or...

2) Download the Catalyst Mobility Utility here:
32-bit: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-32.aspx
64-bit: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-64.aspx
NOTE: it is sort of hidden. You have to click the link to download Catalyst Software Suite, and it will give you the tiny little program you must run which will download the full driver package. The driver package that this utility downloads is the ONLY driver package that I could get my hands on which operated my mobile radeon 3200 properly.

If you have a Mobile Radeon HD 3200, this should help you resolve your issue.

great first post, Xorior - welcome to sevenforums - you'll fit right in

Thanks for the warm welcome. Those are always nice!