I recently bought a new computer and installed an EVGA Geforce 9600 GT shortly thereafter. While playing The Sims 2, I received a blue screen of death, followed by several "regular" crashes throughout the following weeks. I fixed the latter (custom content issue), and the the blue screen appeared to be an isolated incident, so I had let the issue go... Until today when I received another blue screen of death. And this was apparently the fourth occurance, since I discovered two more dump files when I went to locate the most recent.

Since I can't open dump files and probably couldn't make sense of them anyway, I thought you guys could help me out.

Care to take a look?

Thanks in advance.

(Attached is the most recent dump log, dated today. If the other two would be of help, let me know.)

Attached Files

Mini051208-01.zip (31.4 KB, 1 views)

Hello Purple Paws... Hairy Brown Paws here... and a tail!

Welcome to PCHF!

OK, for the first time, I'm a little bit unsure about this one, as it's the first time I have seen this kind of Blue Screen of Death, probably because I am not up to date yet with Vista, so your might just have to be my guinea pig for this one?

After throughly analysing your log, it would appear to be a DirectX driver issue, so just to rule out DirectX, please can you download and re-install the following: DirectX® 10

The logs are showing that one of your system files (dxgkrnl.sys), is attempting to end and release video memory. Perhaps your ending a game at the time of the Blue Screen of Death? Before memory can be released, it must first be cleared. When it is coming to release that memory, it is finding that it has not been cleared, resulting in a Blue Screen of Death. This may also suggest a physical memory problem on the card itself, if it was unable to clear that memory.

What is throwing me off the track a little bit, is that I've search around to check for other fix's to this problem. Some have suggested that this is an overheating issue, others say it's a CPU problem (although I don't see how). Compatibility issue was another. So, I without any solid fix's to this problem, I think we need to rule out one thing at a time.

Thanks so much for the reply!

I know the card isn't overheating since the temps only seem to have an eight degree fluctuation span, and I don't think it's an incompatibility issue as I've heard of many people with that card and Vista playing TS2 with no problem. But actually, I'm starting to wonder if it is, indeed, related to the game at all since the two other logs were created at a time when there was no one present. (And by the way, the two that I witnessed happened when the game was in full-swing, not when I was exiting.) Could it be a background task?

DirectX reinstall was actually next on my list of things to try last time (before I fixed the other crashes and forgot about the issue), so it's funny you should mention that. I'll definitely give that a try. However, because the blue screens have been so infrequent, it could be up to a month before I'm able to tell if that fixed it. ...But I guess you'll all still be around then, huh?

It's possible, many applications/games override and manage it's own memory usage, altough it really did seem to originate from the DirectX driver itself.

Yep, I'll still be here lol, I keep this thread open for the next month or so as well, so let us know how it goes. If you still have problems after that time, if you can start a new thread (refer to this one), with a new dump/log file, just incase I'm no longer subscribed to this problem, is this OK?

Yeah, that would be fine, thanks! I'll keep you updated if/when the problem persists.

ok