always get the latest drivers...NOT

Cubase
1

Hello,

my system had, over the last few weeks, been getting increasingly unstable. Probably Windows had updated some drivers etc. I first noticed it when working on a movie score with the video track running, Cubase would sometimes start stuttering real fast, become frozen for a few seconds and get back to normal. I first thought it was the disc wit the video, for some reason not being fast enough, so I put the video on an external HD, seemed temporarily better.
I wrote to Nvidia, they suggested the newest driver.( Geforce 7300) Did that, but that one seemed totally shakey, my second monitor would get blacks and stutters occasionally…OK so I roll back.
The stutters got more frequent, then the BSODs started, saying
" attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed…"
I got scared…the blue screens started to happen more and more often, until today, working in Cubase became impossible, as it crashed every 5 minutes. Then I really got scared. A new attempt at the very latest driver resulted in the dreaded message:
“Display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered”, after a flickering black screen, after which Cubase would only record some sort of digital noise :astonished:

I googled the “display driver…” message, found literally hundreds of messages from people complaining about the problem, with different video cards all over the place, and apparently no solution in sight!! Ironically, it never happened to anyone on XP, it started with Vista and went on to win7.
I really really got really scared…new card? new computer?? my score… :frowning: etc…still have my emergency XP partition but wel you know…

Had a live chat with some Nvidia tech guy who apparently had not much of a clue what he was to say to me…the usual “have you tried reinstalling or updating, check our FAQ bla bla…” left me hopeless.
Finally stumbled across some forum with the same issue, and where some guy said: “Do NOT always get the latest drivers, when your card is like 2 years old…”
So I went to the Nvidia archive and picked some random driver from 2009…and guess what… up and running without a glitch for 5 hours now.

Just thought I’d share my lesson learned…

2

Yeah, NVidea has released some dogs in the past. A wise man once said" If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.". :wink:

3

so very true…thing is i remember windows auto update telling me there was a new display driver available…would you like to…etc.
not anymore.

4

Auto updating Windows is a no-no in DAW land to begin with. Imagine it eating resources during a critical take. :wink:

5

no worries I set it to notification first and then ask for install…

6

I feel your pain. Windows Update is awful. A few months back it automatically updated some display drivers on my non-DAW computer. The next time I started it up, the screen remained completely black. I ended up having to reinstall Windows with the original drivers. The problem is Update will sometimes choose incorrect or non-compatible drivers for your computer. Lucky, my DAW comp isn’t connected to the internet!

7

Personally I’ve never had problems with NVidia, but I have heard of a number of issues. When I went to Win 7 (basically built a new computer), I got a new vid card as well. I gave my previous card (7900GT) to my roomate, so he could build a utiliy Win 7 system for the house (network shares, printer host, etc…). We had problems with the video looking like an old tv where the vertical/horizontal scan was messed up. Apparently my older video card had problems with Win 7… a verified issues after researching.

So in summary, NVidia is USUALLY pretty good but not always. :neutral_face: I had always stuck with NVidia because I had heard ATI was a real nightmare. So for me it’s just old habit. Now I hear ATI is much better of course… Ok, so this was a bit of a ramble.

I will update, but not often. Usually when I see something weird, a glitch, the cursor jittering a little, etc… So far I’ve never had problems with them. Could your video card have come unseated a little, or overheated or breaking down? That will definitely give you a performance degrade, leading to blue screens and shutdowns…

8

Hey John,

well so far it seems the problem is completely gone with the old driver from their archives. The
“Display driver stopped responding and has successfully recovered” problem seems to be quite a plague though, if you google it you^ll find hundreds of threads on it. one can seem lucky if it doesn’t strike you too , it seems, although I never heard of it until it happened to me.
should the problem come back I might try another / new card and see, but according to what people say it happens with different card brands and is Vista / win7 related.