Tag Archives: nvlddmkm

Technical

Vista with a cleaner face

After fooling around with Vista, I decided to try my luck with Windows 7 beta…and no surprises here, it’s just Vista with a cleaned up act. Unfortunately the same error occurring in Vista (Nvlddmkm stopped responding) is still present in Windows 7. I finally had to suck it up and down-clocked my rig back to stock settings, at which point, Windows 7 happily obliged and behaved itself. What a bummer!
Technical

And yet another “nvlddmkm driver not responding” post

My rig is down. It has been down ever since I installed a new video card (upgraded from a BFG 7950GT to an XFX 8800GTX fitted with a Zalman cooler), retweaked my overclocking settings, resulting in a corrupted XP install. I figured it was time to make the transition to Vista…after all, SP1 should’ve fixed the problems, right?

Not exactly.

Knowing that Vista is extremely (!!!) sensitive to hardware stability, I took about 2 days offline to test my settings before slapping a vanilla install of 32 bit Vista Enterprise with SP1. My machine ran a stable oc of 3.2GHz at 1.6v with my 2x1Gb Kingston HyperX RAM being fed 2.55v and MCH voltage at 1.75. Ran perfectly stable using the battery of tests on my UBCD. Vista installed without complaint, and I soon got to work installing updates, drivers, and my default software environment, a la Vista. Incidentally, the driver version I used was the latest available: 182.50.

One quick unrelated complaint: Universal ABIT, your ftp sites are down. They have been down for a long time (I can remember surfing over there back in December and January and still unable to download anything). I can’t get my stupid Vista-compatible drivers or utilities for my AW9D-MAX off your site. Pathetic! I’m already rethinking my passion for your products…maybe my next rig will be built around an Asus or Gigabyte board.

Back to my Vista video driver woes…So I’m happily tweaking my rig back to functional again. Been watching movies online and off DVDs, been installing software without a hitch…when suddenly, I spy the error tab in the system tray reporting “nvvlddmkm driver has stopped responding”. This occurs intermittently every 5 to 10 minutes, but I pay it no mind since I haven’t really been pushing the hardware yet, e.g. playing a game. The game in this case is WoW. So I load into the game–Vista left my game folder intact–and I start puttering around in Dalaran and Orgrimmar…when whammo! WoW freezes…flashes my screen…then hard locks…and then I’m alt-tabbed out to Task Manager to end it. The familiar complaint pops up from the system tray, informing that Windows has recovered.

Not good when your gaming rig can’t play games due to a misbehaving driver. So I Google, and I learned that this error is a very regular occurrence with Vista users (see the 113 page forum thread at the official NVidia forums). At this point, I’m still optimistic, being the “uber tech” that I am…I figured I can, with a little investigation, overcome this setback and proceed on my merry way.

About 48 hours later, reinstalling WoW, tried registry hacks and beta drivers, driver and patch uninstalls/reinstalls, overvolting my hardware, benchmarking and stress-testing my system, and a second install of Vista, I’ve decided it’s not worth the extra headache. Vista simply is not going to behave with my hardware currently overclocked. (My system pushed the stability envelope already, having gone through 3 sets of RAM just to get it to perform the way I wanted it to.) My options now are down to two: roll back to XP or move on to Windows 7 beta. But with Windows 7 labeled as “Vista without the suck”–as one coworker put it–will it inherit Vista’s low fault-tolerance?

I feel for the folks who have untweaked hardware experiencing these same issues, and even more sympathy for the people whose understanding of tech is limited to using their pc for surfing, gaming and the occasional entertainment use. It’s a big headache when you dish out the dough for some good hardware only to be thwarted by your operating system.

More references on this problem around the web: