So, I've got a 2009 M17x Alienware. I've got a dedicated Nvidia Geforce 9400 graphics card and a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 260m. Besides that, I don't know much. I think 4 CPUs, I know 8 gigs of RAM, and i'm running 64bit Windows 7.
The discrete card turns off if my computer goes on battery, but seems to be turning off more recently. My most recent attempt to fix this involved me going in Bios and changing a couple settings, one of which I thought I needed to change, but do not remember what it is. I believe its the bottom of the four. I pressed F10 to save and exit, and it came up with a box saying something about restore settings or reset. I don't remember. Anyway, I found out that my dad had failed to allocate half my Disk0 space to a drive, so I went from having (c: ) and (f: ) to (c: )(totally new) (f: )(unchanged) and (g: )(old c drive). Someone was helping me fix all this and set it up to keep this new C: drive as the operational booting drive rather than switch it back and risk completely ruining my computer. So, i switched all my personal files and a few programs from (g: ) to (c: ) and formatted (g: ).
Now, the problem. I've been playing arma 2, chivalry: medieval warfare, and arma 3 with no problems until this weekend. Now, anytime I launch, Arma 2 crashes my computer. The game video freezes, with the audio freezing temporarily. I'm able to talk in teamspeak for a few moments, but no keystrokes show onscreen/work(ctrl+alt+del, alt+tab, etc) Then my computer fully freezes, goes black, and then brings up the blue error message screen saying the display driver crashed and failed to recover in the timeout period(or something similar), dumps the physical memory, and reboots. Chivalry does this occasionally but can occasionally "reset" or recover if I instantly press ctrl alt del and take it off the game, then go back.
I checked my drivers through device manager and it says they are all up to date. However, i checked them with a program someone recommended on here for someone else, driver inspector, and it says I have 32 out-of-date drivers. It said all four of my IDE/ATAPI drivers were out of date, yet device manager says they are not.
Is this a driver problem, did I screw up when formatting (g: ), or is it something i simply have no clue about?
Please, give it to me simple. I know enough about computer to install necessary things, run stuff, and do diagnostic scans, but I do not code, put together, or set up computers.
--update-- It happened again. When It came back up, an error message window came up with "windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown" and this was in more information:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 116
BCP1: FFFFFA800D1E14E0
BCP2: FFFFF88005F7F028
BCP3: FFFFFFFFC000009A
BCP4: 0000000000000004
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 768_1
Files that help describe the problem:
C:\Windows\Minidump\070614-119964-01.dmp
C:\Users\D****\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-489546-0.sysdata.xml
The discrete card turns off if my computer goes on battery, but seems to be turning off more recently. My most recent attempt to fix this involved me going in Bios and changing a couple settings, one of which I thought I needed to change, but do not remember what it is. I believe its the bottom of the four. I pressed F10 to save and exit, and it came up with a box saying something about restore settings or reset. I don't remember. Anyway, I found out that my dad had failed to allocate half my Disk0 space to a drive, so I went from having (c: ) and (f: ) to (c: )(totally new) (f: )(unchanged) and (g: )(old c drive). Someone was helping me fix all this and set it up to keep this new C: drive as the operational booting drive rather than switch it back and risk completely ruining my computer. So, i switched all my personal files and a few programs from (g: ) to (c: ) and formatted (g: ).
Now, the problem. I've been playing arma 2, chivalry: medieval warfare, and arma 3 with no problems until this weekend. Now, anytime I launch, Arma 2 crashes my computer. The game video freezes, with the audio freezing temporarily. I'm able to talk in teamspeak for a few moments, but no keystrokes show onscreen/work(ctrl+alt+del, alt+tab, etc) Then my computer fully freezes, goes black, and then brings up the blue error message screen saying the display driver crashed and failed to recover in the timeout period(or something similar), dumps the physical memory, and reboots. Chivalry does this occasionally but can occasionally "reset" or recover if I instantly press ctrl alt del and take it off the game, then go back.
I checked my drivers through device manager and it says they are all up to date. However, i checked them with a program someone recommended on here for someone else, driver inspector, and it says I have 32 out-of-date drivers. It said all four of my IDE/ATAPI drivers were out of date, yet device manager says they are not.
Is this a driver problem, did I screw up when formatting (g: ), or is it something i simply have no clue about?
Please, give it to me simple. I know enough about computer to install necessary things, run stuff, and do diagnostic scans, but I do not code, put together, or set up computers.
--update-- It happened again. When It came back up, an error message window came up with "windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown" and this was in more information:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 116
BCP1: FFFFFA800D1E14E0
BCP2: FFFFF88005F7F028
BCP3: FFFFFFFFC000009A
BCP4: 0000000000000004
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 768_1
Files that help describe the problem:
C:\Windows\Minidump\070614-119964-01.dmp
C:\Users\D****\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-489546-0.sysdata.xml