Solved Lock-ups and BSODs, Gaming or Not

[TheNewFlesh]

Hello

First, thanks for creating a place for people to better understand their OS installs. Also, thanks to anyone who's bothering to read other people's threads and help strangers with computer issues.

I've gotten a couple BSODs recently, but much more frequently, things just lock-up. By "lock up", I mean the mouse cursor won't move. When it "locks up" in games, audio will loop and stutter. I can't ctrl-alt-del, and I can't ctrl-shift-esc. Sometimes this happens with just firefox open, sometimes I'll just be in iTunes and my computer gives up. I know those programs are resource hogs, but my crappy Dell should be able to handle it. I cannot seem to reproduce the problem willingly, and it seems to happen less likely if the computer's been on for a long time.

I suppose I noticed these somewhat recently, I was getting a lot of "AMD display driver stopped working and has recovered" messages, which sometimes meant a freeze, sometimes just annoyingly flickered the display. I google that and someone suggested I extend the retry time several seconds by altering a registry entry. I did so, and the previous symptoms seemed to get replaced by BSODs and frusterating lock-ups.

I've since installed the lastest AMD beta drivers, unsure if my registry tampering ever reverted.

I also noticed my "PCI fan" may not have been operating, perhaps some component overheated?

I'm stubbornly hoping it's not permanent hardware failure, it's only just over 3 yrs old (Jan '11)


Any suggestions or insight would be most appreciated, thanks for reading! As my computer purchase indicates, I still have plenty to learn.


No idea what specs might be relevant without reading systeminfo.txt
Win7 Home Premium x64
Alienware (Dell) yeah, yeah, I know...
i7 2.8GHz
Crossfire HD5670

 

[TheNewFlesh]

I know it's a long shot, and I can't reproduce any issues on demand, but thanks for checking my thread out.

This is my first and will be my last shameless bump

 

[Golden]

*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information.

BugCheck 116, {fffffa80095c4010, fffff8800484edc0, 0, 2}

*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for atikmpag.sys
*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for atikmpag.sys
Probably caused by : atikmpag.sys ( atikmpag+bdc0 )

Followup: MachineOwner
---------

The latest bugchecks all seem to be video card related. Unfortunately, bugcheck 116's can be tricky to solve.

I would completely uninstall all Radeon video drivers:
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/GPU57RemoveOldGraphicsDrivers.aspx#Win7
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/83814-drivers-clean-left-over-files-after-uninstalling.html

Now reboot the computer. Run a Windows Update and let it install the video driver it recommends.

Now go through this thread to see if these troubleshooting steps are of any assistance:
http://www.sevenforums.com/crash-lo...op-0x116-video_tdr_error-troubleshooting.html

 

[TheNewFlesh]

Thank you very much for the reply, Golden. I'm going to mark this topic solved and post my conclusion, in case anyone googles this.

EDITED
-Tried some stuff
-Prematurely marked this thread solved
-BSODs reappeared soon
-Slowly continued reading and troubleshooting from this link

Now go through this thread to see if these troubleshooting steps are of any assistance:
http://www.sevenforums.com/crash-lo...op-0x116-video_tdr_error-troubleshooting.html

-The following except from the above link seems to have solved my issue:

Use this technique to "reset" your pagefile:
a ) Go to Start...Run...and type in "sysdm.cpl" (without the quotes) and press Enter.
-Then click on the Advanced tab,
-then on the Performance Settings Button,
-then on the next Advanced tab,
-then on the Virtual Memory Change button.
b ) In this window, note down the current settings for your pagefile (so you can restore them later on).
-Then click on the "No paging file" radio button, and
- then on the "Set" button. Be sure, if you have multiple hard drives, that you ensure that the paging file is set to 0 on all of them.
-Click OK to exit the dialogs.
c ) Reboot (this will remove the pagefile from your system)
d ) Then go back in following the directions in step a ) and re-enter the settings that you wrote down in step b ). Follow the steps all the way through (and including) the reboot.
e ) Once you've rebooted this second time, go back in and check to make sure that the settings are as they're supposed to be.

-Also reverted to the ancient drivers that shipped with this overpriced Dell, will experiment with later drivers if/when a game misbehaves or under-performs

I doubt he'll see this again, but thanks again, Golden. Your participation on a forum such as this improves others' lives and enlightens people like me. I may be drinking.