Friday, November 01, 2013

SOLUTION: Nvidia Kernel Mode Driver errors


This is one of the most annoying errors I've come up against using NVIDIA graphic cards and judging from others' online posts, many have faced similar problems.  Unfortunately, "Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version stopped [] responding and has successfully recovered" doesn't exactly communicate what's going on with the video card.

In my own experience, this error kept looping over and over again while I playing video games. 

Problem Identification
  1. You may need to update your video card drivers.
  2. You may have an incompatible program/video game that's causing the issue.
  3. Your card maybe experiencing too much heat.
  4. You may have a bad video card.

The solutions for #1, #2, and #4, are fairly straightforward.  Update your drivers, test other programs.  And if you can exchange for the same model video card to test, go ahead and do it.  But the third issue in particular, overheating, is often overlooked in most online posts.  

You need to monitor your internal PC / GPU temperatures to see if it's simply an overheating problem.  Your overall cooling solution, or lack of, in your personal computer/laptop might be the cause.

Solution for #3: SpeedFan
This free program helps you monitor all of your fans, measure core temperatures, and allows you to set thresholds to improve your system's cooling.  This simple freeware program helped reduce heat problems in my system and the kernel driver errors no longer appeared.

Safe CNET Download Link: Speedfan

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