Driver Problem

[wole04]

Anyone have any ideas on how to diagnose a driver problem.
Some driver on my system randomly gives BSOD restarts but can't think of what it could be. microsoft online crash test wasn't too helpful either, it only reports the cause of the crash to be a device driver.
Any suggestions, don't want to have to reinstall windows and even if i do without knowin the culprit, i might just reinstall the bad driver again
Thanks guys
Great forum by the way, loads of useful info

 

[Blazer]

do you have any yellow marks in device manager ?,what makes you believe the bsod is a driver issue,can you state what the prob is.

 

[bacillus]

Assuming you're using Windows 2000 or XP then right click my computer on the desktop> properties> advanced> startup and recovery> settings then uncheck automatically restart under system failure.
This will allow you to see exactly what the error message is hopefully narrowing the troubleshooting.

 

[wole04]

thanks guys
No yellow marks in device manager. i knew it was a device driver problem because windows says so when i click on the 'send error report' thing after it restarts.
I've cleared the restart automatically check box but i'm not sure if that'll be safe because according to windows, it says it restarted to protect my comp from damage, so if it doesn't restart, could it damage the comp.
Thanks any more info u need let me know

 

[Crusty]

Yeah, what does the BSOD say?

 

[loic2003]

This has happened to me previously. The only thorough fix is to install the latest drivers for all the hardware that you can. It sounds daunting but isn't really, especially if you have broadband. Things like network cards shouldn't need new drivers, I'd go down the following list in order:


Graphics Card
Motherboard
Sound card
NIC

and also other cards you may have such as TV Cards, etc.

It could also be a BIOS setting. A common cause of a system crash with BSOD can be the BIOS settings for the graphics card. Find the settings that effect the graphics card (try google) and tweak these. AT worst reset the BIOS to default values.

Are the crashes random or do they occur when you do something in particular?

 

[loic2003]

This has happened to me previously. The only thorough fix is to install the latest drivers for all the hardware that you can. It sounds daunting but isn't really, especially if you have broadband. Things like network cards shouldn't need new drivers, I'd go down the following list in order:


Graphics Card
Motherboard
Sound card
NIC

and also other cards you may have such as TV Cards, etc.

It could also be a BIOS setting. A common cause of a system crash with BSOD can be the BIOS settings for the graphics card. Find the settings that effect the graphics card (try google) and tweak these. AT worst reset the BIOS to default values.

Are the crashes random or do they occur when you do something in particular?

 

[wole04]

the crashes occur randomly.
i'll try like u said and try reinstall all my drivers
hope it solves the problem