Lockup under Vista/ Nvidia GPU

I get a lockup of my system almost immediately after SL software startup. Every thing loads correctly and I'm able to walk around for about 30 seconds and then a lockup everytime. My video driver is old, I know. It's the only one that will even start SL. I tried the newest ForceWare Release 162 Version:162.22 WHQL from Nvidia but the SL software wouldn't even start after upgrading to that. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here are my specs.
Dell Dimension E521
AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core 3800+ 2GHZ
Windows Vista 32 Bit
Nvidia GeForce 7300LE 256 MB ,Driver 7.15.10.9746
2 GB Memeory DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz
250 GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200 rpm)

try downloading the drivers from omega.

http://www.omegadrivers.net/nvidia.php

wireless setup?

First, your Graphic Card is weak. That might be the main concern here.
Second, Vista is not really useable for many
Third, Go to the http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_162.22.html ( and they eForce 7300 LE is supported)

Don`t deal with Omega driver...........

Usagi

I checked recently, nVidia have released a new set of drivers that are Vista compatible.... however most upgrades are for the DirectX faterinity, and OpenGL releases are very slow.

I am experiencing the same problems. I also notice that periodically when I do get into SL, some of the textures do a kind of psychedelic rapidly-changing color thing that is really odd. Sometimes I can get in and it will work for a while, but eventually SL will lock up on me. Sometimes it will crash and I get a message from Vista saying that the video driver stopped responding, and then SL errors out with a message about program was aborted abnormally.

I am running a similar setup as the OP, except that my video card is an nvidia GeForce 7600GT 256 PCIx card.

I've tried the newest ForceWare drivers ver. 162.22 WHQL from Nvidia as well, but that does not help. If anyone can help with this, short of saying get rid of Vista, please let me know!

disable your VBO, preference, adv.graphics, disable vbo there, usually what causes rainbows.

Thanks for all the replies. I solved my problem by reformatting my hard drive and installing Windows XP. lol I've had it with Vista. I had numerous problems with nearly all my games and applications. No longer. Went back to the reliable XP and am much happier.

Preston not that its much help, but i have pretty much the same symptoms as you and also am using the 7600gt and same driver version (there is a subsequent beta driver and links to a couple of MS hot fixes on the Nvidia web site but these dont seem to give any improvement).

Giving seriuos consideration to putting Vista back in the box until things improve.....


Further to my post above I think resolved my problem, preston maybe this will work for you?

I have two stick of Ram each 1gb It was suggested i remove one and see how things ran just in case i had faulty memory (its brand new...) well having removed one stick I have been running sl for the last 2 hours without any problems and ran a film in another window at the same time just to really push things along (media player was also crashing befoire i removed the ram with same crash messages etc).

Need to put the suspect stick of ram in the pc on its won just to see how it runs and so on - but seem likely this is the culprit.

Billy

Yep, I'm getting the same thing as well, but the rainbow is only occasional and doesn't bother me too much. My display driver constantly stops responding - sometimes I can use SL for an hour or more, sometimes it stops responding within 5 minutes of logging in. For now I'm dual-booting with XP until Vista support gets better.

My card is a 7900 GTO with 512mb of memory. Clearly nvidia has some lovely driver issues they need to take care of.