VIDEO_TDR_ ERROR on Blue Screen of death

Hello,

I am using a Lenovo T61p laptop running windows 7 Pro with Service Pack 1

The computer occasionally gets a blue screen of death complaining about the display driver.

I believe the only program that was running at the time of the blue screen was IE but I think it also happened once when no programs were running and the machine was sitting idle.

The error is:

The VIDEO_TDR_ ERROR bug check has a value of 0x00000116. This indicates that an attempt to reset the display driver and recover from a timeout failed.

After this error occurs, the machine then can no longer boot into normal mode.  It will however boot into safe mode.

To temporarily fix the problem and allow the computer to boot into normal mode, I have to run Startup Repair during the boot process.  The problem eventually returns though.

I worked through this issue in the Malware forum but was redirected here once it was determined that this was not a malware issue.  Here is a link to that thread so that you can see what we tried

http://forums.whatthetech.com/index.php?showtopic=127585

Thank you for any advice you could offer.

From what I can see that use's an Nvidia card ?

Nvidia have a serious driver issue of late, many people (myself included) are having such crashes due to this, and it's been going on for the last few drivers, I was going crazy with crashes wiping out loads of work thinking my card was going faulty, to of eventually found threads talking about this widespread issue, I then reverted to an older driver, and have been rock solid since.

The main thing to watch out for is windows (or even Nvidia itself's updater) doesn't sneak an update in past you, or you will start having the same issue again, of course this assumes it is the problem, but given the vast amount of people facing this, it's not an unreasonable to start here than look elsewhere for now.

So get the Nvidia v314.22 driver (this appears to be what I'm using) and see how you go, when you install it, be sure to check the box that says do a clean install, it completely removes the current driver before installing it's driver, if you don't see this option you may need to select an advance install, if it is as I suspect then this should resolve it, hope it helps.

Thank you for your suggestion

The graphics unit on this machine is an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M

In safe mode I was able to download the suggested driver.

When I tried to install it, I got the following error during the System Check Compatibility

=======================================================

"This NVIDIA graphics driver is not compatible with this version of Windows.

This graphics driver could not find compatible graphics hardware"

=================================================

Is this possibly an issue trying to perform this installation in safe mode?  I will try Start Up Repair to see if I can get back into normal mode and try this process again and report back.

 I think I see a possible issue.

My laptop is 32 bit, I think the link you gave was for a 64 bit version.

In looking in the device manager, the driver is very old (2009) so I don't think I was caught up in a newer driver update for this specific issue.

That would be why then lol, sorry, it's just unusual to see 32bit these days, well I guess there are lot's about, but with many having 4gig + of ram as standard these days, 32bit is very limiting to this.

Anyway, can't find the exact version number, maybe because it's a notebook, possibly they use different coding on these ?

But the closest version I could find is the QUADRO NOTEBOOK DRIVER RELEASE v314.07, give that a try as it has to be very close to the one I first linked, see if that helps.

But if you want to search for older drivers, go Here and you can access the older versions, but hopefully the one I have linked this time will do the job, fingers crossed.

Thank you.

I am currently downloading a display driver I found on the Lenovo site that stated it was specific for that machine.

If that does not work, I will try and use your latest link to see if that makes a difference.

Thank you again for your suggestions.

Yes you should be perfectly safe using that driver, because if they have it there, then it should be working just fine, it's why you always see old drivers if you go to makers sites, they may only issue updates for the first year maybe, after which I guess they just figure people would just upgrade, so there would be no demand, so it's all about the money IMHO, but with luck the driver you get from them should be just the job if all goes well, just remember check the clean install check box, that way it removes ALL previous drivers that it had been using, meaning less chance of any problems, good luck.

I just wanted to update this thread to say that the change in drivers to the newest version appears to have solved the problem.

Since I made the change on January 7th, the problem has not come back.

Thank you for your help!

NP Thanks for the update, the latest update from Nvidia (v332.21) does appear to of sorted the problem now, at least my system has now been running stable since that update, but glad your sorted.