Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

[Genocidicbunny]

On Vista, Ive actually seen the graphic driver crash once (overheating) and then recover itself without a reboot. It was ... interesting.

Thats what it should be doing. A lot of the complaints with Vista were due to bad graphics drivers, which didnt recover as gracefully.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

On my old XP box when the drivers crashed it either made the screen turn all crazy colors or made a reboot.

 

[shadowplay]

I recently installed DivX player on my vista x64 desktop. Ever since, playing video in any program causes the computer to crash, about 2 seconds into the video playing. It is also crashing when the power-saving feature automatically shuts off the monitor. Rolling back the display driver didn't make any difference.

help meeeeeeeeee

Id say a codec issue. Try removing that completely and install K-Lite Codec Pack or CCCP. (I use K-Lite but other members here use CCCP).

I uninstalled all the DivX related stuff from my computer, and then installed the K-Lite Codec Pack, but to no avail.

In addition to video, it seems I can't launch any games, either...

The only program that will play video without crashing and giving me a blue screen is real player.

DXDIAG isn't reporting any problems found... anti-virus and anti-malware report no problems...

ugh. I'm in way over my head here.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Sounds like a video driver issue. I suggest doing a complete wipe of the video driver and reinstalling it.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

They must have changed the driver model since WinXP then. You used to be able to crash the PC big time since you ran in executive (ring-0) mode (and could even call a function to cause a blue screen ).

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I dont know much about ring levels other than it's a Very, Very Bad Thing to run drivers and stuff as ring 0.

 

[NedimNapoleon]

I have a problem, my cousin has a Realtek AC '97 sound card but we formatted his disk and reinstalled windows and now we cant install his driver, when I try to instal the Realtek AC '97 driver in the middle of the installation the computer restarts? whats wrong?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

On XP you couldn't access hardware or run hardware interrupts unless you were in Ring-0. You also need to run above the page file manager so it doesn't switch your code out of physical RAM when you need to handle an interrupt.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

On XP you couldn't access hardware or run hardware interrupts unless you were in Ring-0. You also need to run above the page file manager so it doesn't switch your code out of physical RAM when you need to handle an interrupt.

So, if a virus gave itself ring 0 access, could it potentially cause things to blow up? I heard of a killer poke on some 1980 machines. You could blow up a monitor if you put the wrong thing in.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

I think most of those have been worked around these days.

In Ring-0 it's easy to crash the OS, but you need admin privilege to install.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

They must have changed the driver model since WinXP then. You used to be able to crash the PC big time since you ran in executive (ring-0) mode (and could even call a function to cause a blue screen ).

Yeah Vista and Win 7 drivers are no longer ring 0, so them crashing is not as problematic.

 

[shadowplay]

Sounds like a video driver issue. I suggest doing a complete wipe of the video driver and reinstalling it.

Alright, I'll give this a try. One dummie question first: is the "video driver" a seperate thing from the "display driver", or the same thing?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Alright, I'll give this a try. One dummie question first: is the "video driver" a seperate thing from the "display driver", or the same thing?

Same thing. Sometimes it shows up as "display adapter" too.

 

[shadowplay]

How do I stop Windows Vista from automatically installing drivers without asking me? I'm having an impossible time performing a clean wipe of my video driver because vista keeps installing the drivers on it's own accord without prompting me or giving me any option to stop it. I've followed the below procedure which is supposed to disable automatic driver installation, but Vista is STILL going ahead and doing it anyways without giving me any option to stop it, which is totally screwing up my attempts for a clean install of the dispay driver.

To disable automatic driver installation: Control Panel > System and
Maintenance > System > Tasks (side panel) > Advanced System Settings >
Hardware (tab) > Windows Update Driver Settings

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

How do I stop Windows Vista from automatically installing drivers without asking me? I'm having an impossible time performing a clean wipe of my video driver because vista keeps installing the drivers on it's own accord without prompting me or giving me any option to stop it. I've followed the below procedure which is supposed to disable automatic driver installation, but Vista is STILL going ahead and doing it anyways without giving me any option to stop it, which is totally screwing up my attempts for a clean install of the dispay driver.

Same issue on my old machine too... sometimes a third-party cleaner can help if you've not tried that.

Question: Yesterday Windows was spitting out Data Execution Prevention messages left and right while trying to do mundane tasks. I rebooted and it cleared itself up. But what exactly would cause this to happen?

 

[Turner]

The only time I've ever seen Windows pop up the Date Execution Prevention messages there was a virus on the machine.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well I double-scanned and I didn't come up with anything. And they all disappeared when I rebooted... So I dunno.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Ive had it happen a couple of times with regular apps, but you can be pretty sure that if its doing it constantly, either there's a hardware fault, or you have a serious viral infestation.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Occasionally Gmail likes to send emails off while I'm in the middle of typing. Im not sure why if i pressed some key combination or something. Is there a way to prevent this?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Are you sure it's actually sending them or merely saving a copy in drafts?