Help diagnosing Win7 crashing problem

If you think you'll be booting to your Windows 7 installation DVD often to experiment or mess around with things, you should copy that DVD onto a bootable USB flash drive or an external USB HDD. It's easily 10x faster to boot and load up versus a DVD.

I used this multiboot program to create an bootable drive: http://www.pendrivelin​ux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

I haven't used the program, but there is something called Driver Genius that supposedly can help you find the latest drivers for all your devices: http://www.driver-soft.com/

I'll only ever boot from anything other than my main disk if something goes horribly wrong. Unfortuntaely windows can't make that DVD so i'll have to see if I can make it elsewhere.

I don't think i'll pay $30 for a driver detection program, but thanks for the suggestion.

I've only just spotted this thread, but I find it interesting as I've been getting exactly the same symptoms. I occasionally get that screen glitch and the message "nVidia driver has stopped responding and was being restarted"; and I occasionally get a full crash where I have to do a hardware reset. The frequency of the problems has gone right down recently - I think it was worse when the weather was warmer.

I use a different processor (i7 2600K), mother board (Gigabyte), SSD (Crucial) etc to you. The only common factors I can see are:
Win 7 64 bit
8GB Corsair RAM (but all the same type in my case)
Nvidia graphics card (GTX 260 in my case)

Temperatures seem fine, and I've updated graphics drivers from the Nvidia site a couple of times.

It's odd that we get the same symptoms with rather different systems. I wonder if Nvidia have some issues with their drivers for Win 7 64?

That's a bad driver. Use Driver Sweeper to clean the current driver and download the previous version. If that still gives you the same error -clean that one off and downlpad the one beofre. And so on until you find one that is stable for your system.

Hi tim I have the 8500GT and dont have any probs with performance either?.
I went to nvidia's site to see if my card needed an update the version no: is 8.17.12.7061
and was released on 07/04/2011, it updated fine and works no problem although i had to reset the screen res.
It says that driver covers vista and win7 could you clarify your driver version.
Having said all this I think it is more likely memory related even though your memory is new (drivers very rarely cause blue screen crashes).

I'd still be taking out that additional (unmatched RAM) TIm, at least to eliminate it.

Graeme, the video card thing is just a minor thing for me, it's the crash and reboot that's annoying.

I'll definitely take the extra 4GB out when I get around to it, next time I reboot or it crashes. I'll report back once I have some kinda of result

tim wrote in post #12450610
Graeme, the video card thing is just a minor thing for me, it's the crash and reboot that's annoying.

Yes, for me too. The reason I was focusing on the graphics drivers is that we both get the same graphics glitches, which seems more than a coincidence...

I know this question is obvious ,
but
Are you overcloking? Or have you ever??

Nope not overclocked. Reloading the BIOS set everything back to defaults too, all I changed was to ACHI/AHCI mode for the disks.

Had a similar issue as you, turns out it was my 2nd hard drive causing the crashes.
Try running your system on the OS drive only for a while.

Fut wrote in post #12456236
Had a similar issue as you, turns out it was my 2nd hard drive causing the crashes.
Try running your system on the OS drive only for a while.

That's weird. I have two SSDs and three spinning disks. Only the SSDs and 4GB of RAM are new, and the SSD run my OS and Bridge cache. Without all the drives I can't really do anything, and given crashes are every 2-5 days I can't really wait to diagnose it.

I'm still planning on pulling the new ram when I get around to it. It hasn't crashed in the past couple of days, and I don't really restart it unless I have to.

Your system SSD is not a first generation sandforce controller? Not likely if it is new but I like to ask the obvious.

Quad wrote in post #12458959
Your system SSD is not a first generation sandforce controller? Not likely if it is new but I like to ask the obvious.

No it's brand new. This one.

So, just to make sure I am not confusing threads you have a fanless graphics card and three traditional hard drives.

Have you tried running it with the case open to see if the crashed stop? That would rule out heat.

Sorry if it I missed it but how large is your power supply?

When memory tests good heat and power need looking at.