New
#1
Display driver not responding but recovered
I'm having a nasty problem where the symptom on my laptop (HP dv7-1232nr w/Win7 HP 64bit) is a UI lock up for about 15~30 seconds, followed by "Display driver stopped responding, but has recovered" error message. This laptop was having overheating problems when I got it (used), but I connected a USB dual cooling fan platform to help control temps plus a background CPU/GPU temp monitor, and for about 5 days it was perfectly fine. I then did some more aggressive maintenance to the laptop, particularly to put in a newer BIOS (F49) and the full feature laden ATI CCC (Catalyst Control Center) software package. Not long after this, things started to go awry.
The display driver error message appears VERY frequently when I first start the laptop (cold), but then after spending a bit of time shutting down and rebooting a few times, it eventually stops suffering this problem... it's almost as though warming up the laptop is the cure. This is strange as issues tend to happen when components heat up, not when running cool!
I'd heard some people say that the later ATI CCC can cause problems and that it's better to roll back to an earlier version. I tried this but it didn't seem to help. I even tried re-running the ATI driver installation package from HP using Vista SP2 compatibility mode.
The ODD THING is that when booting up in safe mode, this problem does not happen. It's only when using the normal mode drivers. I cannot find any useful error messages in the windows logs.
So I'm trying to figure out if this is a software or hardware issue. Is it possible for a motherboard component that is going faulty to be temporarily rectified when warmed up? Is there some kind of hardware tolerance dependency whereby the basic SAFE MODE drivers can handle it while normal mode drivers cannot? I don't know what else to consider.