Crashing - Vista, Intel or Both?

For the past few months, I have been using my HP Pavilion dv6235nr Notebook PC (Vista OS), featuring the Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 on the Mobile Intel 945GM Express chipset, without problems ... until recently. Now my PC crashes all the time, sometimes triggered by moving my camera view or sometimes when I simply walk around / move about.

I understand that Intel video cards / drivers are not supported. However, I was hoping someone could provide some advice that could help stabilize my system. Maybe some setting changes on my Notebook or within SL Preferences can "minimize" my instability issues.

I don't have the possibility to replace the video chipset on this PC or get a new PC (as some might suggest) ... and I would like to continue using SL. I am only looking for any tips or tricks I can try that could improve my chances of success with SL.

I tried going through SL Support and after reviewing my DxDiag.txt they had no ideas suggested that I visit this board and ask for help here.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Joe Minnelli

Any Vista+SL attempts I've seen/tried to lend a hand with recently have all failed. Everything from different versions of drivers to complete clean-out's and reinstalls. Most all end up with suggesting hardware changes to correct things. Sorry.

Hopefully things will change soon. Have you tried the latest Nicholaz viewers?

http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

I helped one of my friends with theres, had her reload her system with the backup disk. She was able to play for awhile till one of the guys she knows had her update her video card drivers to the newest one and now she get disconnected all the time. The only thing I can suggest is changing OS on your computer, I have heard of alot of crashing with Vista. I think the video drivers are not stable enough to run SL.

Intel video is horrible, and on Vista , surprise if anyone can get SL to work on it without crashing all the time, its a poor card that doesnt like opengl.

on Vista so far, nvidia hands down best opengl on it right now, some lucky ati owners can use it without to much issues.

congratulations you just rolled snake eyes on the game of "when will my intel graphics chip magically stop working with sl"


you can get agp radeion 9550's for 17 bucks at newegg and PCI-E geforce 6600GT's for 30 at tiger direct

get something that supported and THEN when it stops working you will have something to post about


thanks for playing

I have nvidia and vista on my laptop. It worked great with SL until SL version 1.16. since then, it crashes anywhere with a lot of stuff going on (ie ground level densely built areas).

So I use my spare PC or else stick to my sky build area for now.

i bet you that your laptop is sharing system memory with the video card, try decreasing the amount alloted to your video card or add more ram and it should decrease or even stop all together if you add enugh

its pretty cheap nowdays, goto crucial.com to figure out what you need and then shop around using the specs it gives you (they are not always the cheapest)

vista is both a video card hog and a memory card hog, and when they both share resources boy howdy

The Intel 945GM Express chipset, is exactly that.. its a welded to MB chip that uses system memory. Vista is a memory hog with all the bling turnned on, so turn that off for a better experience. Turn off the 'bling' in SL as well all back to bare minimum and then once ur in, tweak the setting up until its bareable.