Windows XP CHALLENGE: Weird screen capture issue...

[Pados]

Hello everyone. I have a difficult one I can't find a fix for. I hope you could help.

I'm running win XP on a Dell Precision M4300, so a pretty good top tear laptop, with 4GB ram, graphics card is a NVidia Quadro FX 360M.

What happens is that after a couple hours working (image editing, 3d rendering...) I have the following failures:
- I cannot take a screen capture. PrintScreen would paste a black image in powerpoint or paint. Snag it returns "unable to capture input"
- I cannot start a VNC session to a remote computer. VNC returns: "error creating local image of screen"
- Powerpoint would ocasionally refuse to display slides. I only see the left column with all the slides...

Only idea I have so far would be some issues with the graphic cards memory. Driver is up to date. (NVIDIA - 7-may-08, 6.14.11.7575; This seems to be a graphics card for Dell laptops specifically. Driver available in Dell support pages). I do not know how I could test this hypothesis...

 

[itsme]

I had a simular problem BUT with a PC it turned out to be the key-board?

have you spoken to dell?

 

[Ian]

If you change your desktop colour depth from 32>16bit (or the other way round) when it stops, does it allow you to take screenshots again?

 

[Ian]

Actually, have you tried download drivers direct from nVidia? They should do them:

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-uk

Click Quadro > Quadro FX Series (notebooks) > Quadro graphics driver and then choose your OS and download. It's probably newer than the ones from Dell.

 

[Pados]

Thanks for your suggestions.
I haven't contacted Dell yet...
As for the driver, Dell managed to get exclusivity of the graphics card. So this specific model does not show up in NVidia's drivers list.
I'll try reducing the colour depth when the problem appears again today.

 

[Madxgraphics]

..
As for the driver, Dell managed to get exclusivity of the graphics card. So this specific model does not show up in NVidia's drivers list.
.

It took me all of 20 seconds to find the driver you need here. Try contacting nVidia for the driver..If they built the device, even for exclusivity for Dell, they will have a base driver...

 

[Pados]

Thx Madxgraphics. However, the one you are referencing to is actually older than the one I have... (Spet '07 vs May '08...) So I assume Dell's website is the most up to date source for the driver.

Now some news on the colour depth (as the problem occured this morning just an hour after I started working ). This actually worked! After changing from 32>16bit, my graphics are behaving normally. I've regained control of Print Screen, and VNC is working !!! Now what would be the root cause of this problem?