"nvlddmkm Display driver stopped responding..." with a twist

[bugmenot]

Dell Inspiron 1520

Vista Home Premium

C2D 2.2, 2GB RAM

8600M GT, official drivers and 169.04 (problem persists)

I love playing Oblivion and Portal on high settings, but the vent on the side of my laptop gets really hot after several minutes of play. I can't find a temperature meter in the nVidia control panel so I don't have the precise temperature.

No matter, whenever I exit a game, it says "Oblivion/hl2/cod4.exe has stopped working" and Windows (fruitlessly) searches for a solution. If I go to Oblivion's main menu and exit, the error still pops up. It happens every time.

Sometimes, when I'm playing for more than 30 minutes, I get the nvlddmkm error which is accompanied by this:

Description

A problem with your video hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly.

Problem signature

Problem Event Name: LiveKernelEvent

OS Version: 6.0.6000.2.0.0.768.3

Locale ID: 1033

Extra information about the problem

BCCode: 117

BCP1: 851E2008

BCP2: 8B8C2F90

BCP3: 00000000

BCP4: 00000000

OS Version: 6_0_6000

Service Pack: 0_0

Product: 768_1

Is there a solution for these horrible problems? Is nVidia doing anything about it? So far their support for Vista has been really poor.

Edited December 31, 2007 by bugmenot

[Guest James]

Hi

I had the same problem with the same hardware when I started to overclock to play crysis at high settings.

I found out that I was overclocking a bit too high and the GPU couldn't support those speeds.

If you are overclocking all you need to do is drop all of the speeds by 10MHz.

It's normal for the side vent to get hot in games, its to prevent overheating.

Have a try with that, otherwise I don't know why.

-James