device driver crash from work, not from home... same laptop

Hi, when I connect to SL with my laptop at work, I get frequent crashes, about half the time these appear as "your device driver recovered from a crash" type problems, where the screen goes black and SL says "not responding" in the blue bar at the top.

From home, the same laptop, same DSL company, although I sometimes crash, it has never been anything about a device driver.

This is an HP HDX entertainment series laptop, bought new in August or September.

Any ideas why this would be so?

Thanks

System specs?

The "device driver crashed and has recovered" message is common if you've got Aero turned on. Turn it off, and the problem should stop, assuming you've got a proper graphics card and you're using an SL-friendly graphics driver version, of course.

As for why it seems to crash more at work than at home, I can think of three possibilities:

1. Coincidence.

2. Perhaps other applications you use while you're at work are causing conflicts with SL and/or Aero.

3. Your network configuration at work is likely quite different from whatever it is at home. It's possible a networking issue is what causes the initial crash. Then when the program refuses to shut down properly, Windows gets ansy, and forces it to stop. The improper shutdown then causes the graphics driver to crash as an after effect.

I'm totally making up number three, but it seems plausible.

Number three makes sense to me also.

However, for sake of being thorough: I am running Vista 64. Although I have heard of Aero on these forums, I've never seen anything called Aero on my computer. How could I confirm that it is or is not running? Thanks.

Specs (not computer literate, so these are from the "system information" program.

Windowd Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 1 Build 6001
HP Pavilion HDX9300 Notebook PC
x64-based PC
Intel Core2 Duo CPU T8100 @ 2.10ghz
physical memory: 4.0 GB
Virtual Memory: 8.21 GB
Page File Space: 4.29GB

Aero is the fancy glassy look that Vista gives your windows by default. You want to turn it off when running SL. Supposedly you can do that by right-clicking the SL executable and choosing Properties/Compatibility/Disable desktop composition. But I don't know if that really works. A more surefire way is to right-click desktop, choose Personalize, Choose the top option (Windows settings), click the link that says something about classic options, then switch from Windows Aero to Windows Basic.

Hope it helps you. I'm running Vista 64, nVidia 8800 Ultra 768, latest drivers, clean install of default SL viewer, and I crash every 10 minutes.

Aha! Thanks Ricky and Chosen. When I followed the "more surefire" instructions you posted, Ricky, I discovered that "Vista Aero" was the color option currently selected. I never saw that before! So I've changed it to "Vista Basic" and I'll see if that helps at all.

Thanks very much!