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Email of the Week – 015

Morning View
photo credit: bitzcelt

QUESTION

Name:  Grac

From:   Pittsburgh

OS:      Windows Vista

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The computer has been shutting down and comes back with the Windows Error Recovery (black screen with print) with the choices of starting normally or in Safe Mode. One time after this I got message saying there was a display error (Error Code 0X00000001)which had recovered successfully. No problems for 3 days, then again it would shut off on it’s own or freeze and need to be restarted. Yesterday the following message came up after this: Display driver NVLddMKM stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
Can you help us with this?

ANSWER

Thanks for writing. Your question presents a great opportunity to not only help you, but demonstrate how other folks can handle a similar problem.

First, we need to define what a driver is. Drivers are programs written to tell the computer how to interact with a piece of hardware connected to or installed inside your computer. Devices like printers, video cards (the equipment that displays the images on our monitors), sound cards, wireless cards and more require these instructions known as drivers.

When our computers receive upgrades for Windows or other software, they can sometimes affect the drivers already installed on our system. Or, a manufacturer might find an anomaly that needs corrected in the hardware that requires an upgrade to the driver. In either case, the result may be an error like you are experiencing.

The first thing to try is upgrading your driver. Use these steps to do so:

  1. Visit your computer manufacturers support web site
  2. Navigate to the support page that matches the model number of your computer
  3. Look for the video driver (or other hardware for those with different problems) option for your version of Windows (they are specific to each version of Windows)
  4. Download the driver to your desktop
  5. Read the instructions on how to install the update
  6. After installing the update, you will usually have to restart computer.

Good luck and thanks again for writing.

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2 thoughts on “Email of the Week – 015”

    1. In the case of Grac’s computer, his error indicated it was a video card. Always carefully read the errors for clues. That being said, the video card is probably the most common hardware driver that has problems followed by the sound card then the network interface card.

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