Graphics Driver Stopping and Restarting

[ghanson59]

HP Notebook 8540w (2010-03)
Intel Core i7 620M, 8GB DDR3 RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 880M
Win 7 Pro x64 OEM. Reinstalled from system disks supplied by HP in FEB-2011.

Getting BSODs with 0xf4 and system fails to save memory dump with error oxc10. It is happening once every day or two. I also am having issues where the graphics driver stopped and was restarted. The message box references a kernel mode driver.

Four days ago I started Driver Verifier and tagged all nVidia drivers. No trouble until today when I received two IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors with code 0x0a. Two hours later I saw the screen flash black then back to normal accompanied by two system "squeaks." Two minutes later it threw the usual BSOD STOP: oxf4, no mem dump due to 0xc10.

PC Wizard reports processor temp 64 C, mobo temp 48 C, cpu core 1 72 C, cpu core 2 71 C, nVidia graphics 60 C - all at no real load on the system (running only PC Wizard and Firefox). The fan is always at 100%.

BSOD logs attached.

Thanks for the help.

Greg

 

[ghanson59]

HP Tech support recommended clearing the hard drive and reinstalling the system from the ground up. I mentioned that I suspect the nVidia driver and he said that could be a possible cause, however, with no log files we have no way to confirm it is the culprit. The fact that the system is unable to write the memory dump file to disk is one of the reasons he is saying to reimage the system.

Any advice before the I blast the hard drive?

 

[Miranova23]

Reimaging should fix your problem if it is indeed non-hardware-related. I'm not too keen on BSOD reports, but I do know that for a memory dump, your pagefile has to be large enough to store it. Have you checked that? Or is your hard drive maybe nearly full? Besides a video driver issue, (reinstall drivers & see if that helps, if you haven't already), that's all else I can think of.

 

[ghanson59]

Paging File is managed by the system and it is currently set to 8047MB (I have 8GB RAM in this machine). There have been 2 video drivers released after the original installation. I'm wondering if one of the patches didn't go over so well.
When I rebuild the system I will only load the latest of each driver type. Hopefully that will resolve the situation.

Thanks for the help.

 

[Miranova23]

No prob. =)
Once you reimage, you can safely alter the pagefile to a min 1.5x your ram, and a max 3x. So for 8GB, (8192MB):
min=12,288MB
max=24,576MB