Vista - Display Driver Has Stopped Responding Error

As I was playing Garry's Mod (a physics sandbox) yesterday my screen flickered, froze for a second, and reverted to normal. It said that the display driver had stopped responding and had recovered. I recently deleted 'hijack.displayproperties' from my registry files with MWB, but I've heard it does nothing if you delete it. Oddly enough I've never had the problem before.

Is there a way to fix it? I've heard that the automatic update sometimes overwrites the nvidia drivers so they have to be reinstalled or something...

I had the same issue, and the ONLY way I fixed it was move to an ATI card.

What's the difference between an ATI and Nvidia card? (I have an 8800GT, if you need to know)

Hello DrKillPatient,

ATI is just another brand of graphics cards. I wouldn't recommend changing your graphics card at this point to fix this error though.

See if reinstalling the NVIDIA driver version may help. The latest version is the 190.38 beta.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

I assume I can just reinstall the drives from the site? I don't have a disc...

By the way this has only happened once. Is it possible that it's just a one-time thing?

It could be just a one time thing, but it would not hurt anything to reinstall the drivers to be safe though.

Latest NVIDIA ForceWare Video Drivers

How can I figure out the series of my graphics card?

By the way, if that doesn't work I guess a system restore will. Would a computer normally come with a disc to do a system restore or do I have to get the disc from somewhere?

Since you have a 8800GT card, it would be the 8 series for a desktop or 8M for a laptop.

I had an 8800 GT also, and a GTS 250. The drivers were timing out. I updated, rolled back, etc. No luck. Nvidia drivers are crapping out on Vista all of a sudden. When I switched to ATI, no problems at all, trust me, from someone who went through the same thing.

If you happen to get an error message in regards to a file named nvddlkm, apparently this is a problem that Nvidia knows about and has no remedy at the moment. That is why I moved to ATI and have not had an issue at all.

Oh and thanks to whoever gave me a bad rating. I know WTF I am talking about regarding this issue.

On that note, goodbye SML001.

No one said that you did or didn't. It's just not good advice to basically tell someone to get a new graphics card as the first step without trying other troubleshooting steps first.