Suddenly getting brief black screen

[Gwaihir]

In the last few days I've started getting a sudden black screen that lasts for about a second or two then recovers and pops up the attached message. There's no pattern to it, it just happens randomly. Is this likely to be an incipient hardware problem or a software glitch?

If anyone's seen anything like this before and can point me in the right direction I'd be most grateful.

 

[samuria]

Try updating nvidia drivers from their site

 

[Gwaihir]

Thanks for the reply. I will do as you suggest although I don't think it's anything to do with the current drivers being out of date. Since Micro$oft stopped supporting Windows 7 there have been no changes to the system for a long time and I haven't installed any new software lately.

 

[flavallee]

You may have better luck with this driver:
GeForce Game Ready Driver | 391.35 | Windows 7 64-bit, Windows 8.1 64-bit, Windows 8 64-bit | NVIDIA

 

[Gwaihir]

Thanks, but I've already found and dowloaded that one. I noticed they don't offer the Studio version.

Before I install I'm going to create a restore point and also make a backup image using Macrium Reflect. Belt and braces!

 

[lukewt1017]

Try seeing if your drivers are out of date.

If they are not out of date, try reinstalling Windows. If you reinstall Windows, be sure to back up your files and get the latest drivers on an external disk, like a CD, USB flash drive, or SD Card, floppy disk, or whatever you would use.

 

[Gwaihir]

They were out of date. As stated above I've created a restore point, imaged the boot partition and installed the new drivers. I opted for a custom install and chose a clean install, only installing the graphics driver. I'm not a gamer so I don't need all the other fancy stuff. I noticed the installer removed a lot of this stuff from the earlier installation.

I do need to do a repair install of Windows at some point because System File Checker reports corrupted files it can't repair because the cached copies are also damaged. For now, unless I have major problems, I'm going to soldier on with it. I haven't had any repetition of the original problem so far so hopefully the new driver has fixed it.

Edit: One week on and no repetition of the problem so it's looking good.