InformAction Forums

This strikes me as a bit weird but.

Had this machine a couple of weeks now and things started well... However about a week back I started getting "Video hardware error" - "A problem with your video hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly." Incidents hit 20 ish a day a couple of days back. I rolled it back to a time when there had only been 1/2 issues, clean installed latest ATI drivers. It locks up completely for maybe 10 secs, the screen goes a misty colour overall and the message that the device has recovered comes up.

It happens when the system is idle as well as when I'm browsing or whatever (not a gamer). (I have Hijackthis log and the like if it helps). There is a "feel" that it is something scheduled - something trying to update or something, very very roughly about three hourly or so.

I can supply any other info that folk consider relevant but there is relatively little installed now & even less actually running.

I just went for nearly 24 hours with no incidents after removing some Firefox addins and disabling updating FF (there was regularity in the lockups suggesting something like that). I then re-installed noscript addin and got a lockup with 15 mins. Seems daft to me that an addin such as this can cause such havoc but...?

Pointers appreciated - TIA

Cheers
Herby

It appears just like it's reported: a hardware failure in your video card.
It can go silent for hours and then appear as soon as you write the wrong memory location on your video RAM, or temperature raises enough to cause a glitch and so on.
Definitely NoScript (nor any other add-on that I know, except maybe Cooliris which uses video hardware acceleration IIRC) cannot trigger anything like this more than any other program at any random time.
You should better try to update your video driver (just as a last hope) but more likely replace your faulty card.

Appreciated - the behaviour struck me as bizarre!

I have GPU-z and the temp is around 40 deg which according to the tech folk is fine. I did a clean graphics drivers update to current ones yesterday so it looks like I need to pester the oem folk about the card.

Thanks
Herby

Should have said above - the incidents did have a time pattern to them (not just random). In the end I had them down as pretty much three hourly for what it's worth - I then gradually un-installed stuff till I had it "stable". That was what made me think of something "updating". Cheers