Hi guys, hope i may get some kind of inspiration or some such from here, as to date, nothing.

ive obviously googled to hell the issue, and have just found various similar problems, none of which are exact to me or even alleviate mine.

bearing in mind, i dont really know the exact conditions for the issue, or indeed if its specific programs or what, but its very annoying and seems to be the same programs that cause it, and i recently bought both full spectrum warrior titles and pinball timeshock from here, ten hammers worked fine, the others didnt.

also:

TAW 2.0
any of the settlers games from here
cultures games (from dot emu)
Silent hunter 3

there are a few others, which off the top of my head i forget, for the most part, it usually seems to be older games, never had issues with fairly newer ones, and never any steam issues

so basically, i click to start the game, and the screen usually (or a variation of) goes black and locks up, and the only way out of it is a hard reset, thats it.

ive tried updating and downrating nvidia drivers, malware scans, virus scans, windows updates, update removals, sometimes chrome is open, sometimes is not, disk defrag, disk cleanup, removing umpteen games.. etc etc.

im at a loss, i thought i fixed it when i removed a driver which seemed to be causing issues, "papyjoy and papycpu" they were, something to do with papyrus and nascar, that didnt fix it.

its win 7 64, nvidia 460m most recent non beta drivers

anybody reckon they know? or have experienced this and fixed it?

cheers anyway

Do you have firewall, AV running ?

Can it be some kind of gpu scaling issue? If you it's only caused by old games, it might have something to do with your gpu not scaling properly since older games use smaller resolution. You might want to enable gpu scaling, also go to your Nvidia panel, Manage 3D settings and in global settings set 'preferred graphics processor' to high performance Nvidia processor. Maybe you laptop is using the integrated gpu since these old games don't require much gpu power (so try to update your integrated gpu as well)

have you done windows update recently (since tuesday) one of the "update packs" fixed directX lock up issues with older versions on newer OS's it was a random and rare lockup and your issues fit the bill.

run win update again and get that massive optional update called "update" or some such... and update direct x and give it a shot again.

if this is not an DX issue i would suggest a full memory scan with your bios options or you can get a utility called memtest86 need to burn to disk and load it.


edit: this could be a thermal issue too, unless you've ruled that out.

guys, some great and knowledgeable suggestions here, appreciate it, i shall look into these ASAP.

Thermal no, i also ruled that out, but neglected to mention it.


also, i cant work out which updaate youre on about, i had a look and downloaded all optional ones it came up with, and ill try that. none were "massive" though, and none were called update. id like to try and track this one down as i like the sound of this possible solution

Most laptops have function keys to black out and/or switch screen, have you checked those? In addition have you tried using an external monitor?

that would be a thought, only sometimes, i can still see a mouse pointer or a static "spinning blue circle" which do not respond to any input, leading me to believe that this is not a switched screen or monitor issue