Often when I leave my computer for a while (more than about 3 or 4 minutes, at a guess) the graphics driver will crash when I come back to it. The screen goes black for several seconds then comes back with a little popup in the bottom right saying "Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered". Sometimes it also freezes on the black screen and I have to reset the power.
I've tried reinstalling the drivers, rolling them back several versions (and I've had this problem for months, so it's not one specific version), replacing the card and modifying the "Timeout detection and recovery" registry value as detailed here.
Searching reveals that several other people have this problem or variants of it, and some have suggested that Windows 7 doesn't restore power to the graphics card properly when it resumes from idling. What do you think? Is there a solution?
Some more details:
- My GPU is an Nvidia GTX 560 Ti, but I was using a GTX 275 before and had the same problem.
- It doesn't make a difference if the computer or monitor is asleep or the screensaver is running (It often crashes when I move the mouse after watching a 3+ minute Youtube video, or if I leave a game paused for too long).
The applications on my startup list (and therefore usually running when I leave the computer) are:
- Microsoft security client
- BOINC Client (Distributed computing program that performs heavy calculations when the screensaver is on)
- Skype
- Dropbox
- Steam
Answer
My computer has been out of action for a month or so (PSU exploded, eBuyer sent me a broken one twice), but I found the problem shortly after getting it up and running again the other day.
The crashes were caused by BOINC, which I had set to run when the computer was idle. I turned it off and now it's not happening any more.
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