Graphics blink/problems at startup

[tomsega]

I was using a rather precarious version of XP pro on my old drive that had the following problem:

At start up, there would be a 3-5 second freeze at the point in which everything usually would be done loading, followed by the screen going black for 2 seconds. After that things would return, albeit with the occasional crash.

So- I installed Windows (SP2, plus the latest mobo/graphics drivers) on a newly formated S-ATA, to fix the problem and leave the old drive for storage.

..But it still happens.

I think its a hardware issue, but I've always had problems seperating the two hard drives. I only recently managed to get the older drive properly appearing as a backup E: drive yesterday after switching the jumper.

The graphics card is just under a year old and has only been removed 3-4 times for a dusting down. Also, I have a very efficient cooling system - my CPU is 49c well overclocked, the GPU 45c without o/c.
Also, I can play games fine for hours, but it struggles a bit to load the nVidia control panel, and occasionally icons on the bottom of the screen are distorted until I brush the mouse over them.

Any ideas?!?!

 

[Abarbarian]

You could try setting the cpu back to stock and see if that makes a difference . Its quick and easy to do and your temps should drop . Best I can offer .

 

[V_R]

Sounds like an unstable system or failing hardware maybe.....

Try running Memtest and orthos to check its all stable.

Have you tried it without the old drive? It maybe faulty, run checkdisk?

 

[tomsega]

Thanks guys, but I've solved the problem.

All I did was reinstall the driver and it worked!
But why should I have had the same problem on two seperate copies of XP? Bizzare.

The only thing I can think of is that installing the 94.24 geforce drivers BEFORE having installed Directx9 and run system update, is a bad idea.

 

[tomsega]

Scrap that - Here's where the problem was:

The version of Coolbits.reg I have --the file that enables overclocking and advanced options in the nVidia control panel-- doesn't seem to like the newest drivers.

It wasn't that I had reinstalled the driver, rather that I had reinstalled the driver and then not ran coolbits again.
Something about the latest drivers must be incompatible with driver versions 93.0+

 

[V_R]

Use ATI Tool or Rivatuner instead then.