Geforce 5700 locks up on all applications

Ok, this is a general tech support question, but I can't find help anywhere.

To alleviate the problem of my radeon 9000 sucking, I went out and bought a Geforce 5700. I uninstalled the ATI drivers, rebooted, and installed the nvidia drivers.

Now, any game I play, I run a 50/50 chance of locking up the game. It always happens, just sometimes it happens later rather than sooner.

The lockup locks up my entire system entirely.. I'm unable to move my mouse or even turn numlock on and off. I have to reboot with the button on my comp.

Any ideas? It's quite frustrating.

LF

A couple of things to consider.

I won't ask if you have the latest drivers.

What are you using for a power supply? I bought a 5700 Ultra recently, and I had problems until I replaced my 300w power supply with a 430. It may not be an issue in your case, but in my case, I'm running with 2 hard drives, 2 optical drives and lots of fans.

I'll also not bring up overheating issues.

Latest drivers.

It shouldn't be overheating, it came with its own heatsink/fan, and I have another system fan blowing on it.

I have a 400w power supply, and currently am running 2 hard drives, 2 cd rom drives, and a system fan.

And the Geforce, of course.

LF

You know, I swear I had it fixed. Really, I did.

But it's still screwing up.

Total system lockup on all 3d games.

What the hell am I doing wrong?

LF

Maybe you should stick to typewriters.

Try unplugging all your drives but the hard drive SL and Windows are installed on. (Or if you have one on one... etc.)

Your power SHOULDN'T be an issue, but if you could borrow a friend's PSU, that might give you a better idea of what's going on.

Failing that, I'm thinking it's your motherboard.

I have over a dozen NVIDIA graphics cards swapping through my six Windows machines, and only my FX 5700 Ultra gives me freezes, lockups etc. such as you describe. I share your pain.

As an ex-NVemployee, I have the ear of some good people. Working with the manager of the NVIDIA driver team, we discovered that an unstable situation occurs when a Windows system has some video DLL files programmed by Microsoft and some by NVIDIA. You want all video DLLs to be programmed by NVIDIA for the best stability.

To resolve the mixed MS-NV driver lockups, Follow these steps carefully. This is not an official fix, but it works for me.

(1)
Download the driver of choice. In my case, that was the 53.03 found here:
ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/53.03/
53.03_winxp2k_english_whql.exe

Alternately, you can download the latest drivers from links found on the NVIDIA home page.

(2)
Double click the downloaded EXE to decompress the driver. This creates a new directory such as c:\nvidia\display\53.03

The installer will auto-launch after decompression. However, you don't need to install now and can quit out of the installer. (If you don't know the difference between decompress and install, go ahead and install drivers.

(3)
Reboot your machine into Safe Mode.

Not VGA mode, but Safe Mode. If you don't know when to use F8 to enter Safe Mode, then get help.

(4)
Start > Control Panel > Add Remove Programs
Remove NVIDIA display drivers.

These might be called GeForce drivers or detonators. DO NOT Remove NVIDIA NForce nor NVIDIA WDM nor NV system utility nor NVDVD if you have them.

(5)
Reboot your machine into Safe mode.

(6a)
Wait until the system stabilizes.

THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT: You do not want Windows to auto-install Microsoft video card drivers now.

(6b)
You may be told Windows has found new hardware and asks you for the location of drivers. You want to "install drivers from a specific location." Browse to the directory from step 2, such as
c:\nvidia\display\53.03

(6c)
If Windows does not find your "new" video card and ask for drivers, then open the directory with Windows Explorer and double click Setup.exe

(7)
Install the NVIDIA driver and reboot.

Hopefully your sytem is henceforth stable and well behaved, until you once again want to re-install the latest NVIDIA drivers.