As title, please help! Aware as I am that a good many of you are well versed in all things techy and computers and ‘stuff like that’, I would very much appreciate any guidance with this…

It’s been going on since last December when the original graphics card stopped graphic-ing and the LPCS fitted a new (and one would like to think, compatible) one – ATI Radeon HD5400 Series.

The main issue is that every time I play an (what I call) embedded video through the browser (FF 13.0.1) i.e. Midweek Movies, after varying lengths of time, often mere seconds, the screen goes black and then returns to the web page with sound but no pictures, just a green rectangle of where the ’embedded’ player is supposed to be.

Also a rather handy message box pops up from the tray in the lower RH bit of screen (please note, I could have said ‘bottom’. Please also excuse my lack of terminology)informing me that:

‘The display driver has stopped working, but has recovered successfully’. Which is, of course, both true and false.

More often than not, the cursor/pointer disappears too. I retrieve the cursor by Ctrl+Alt+del and as soon as the screen goes blue and Vista like, it returns.

Quite obviously the recovery has been partial and unless ATI consider partial performance of their products, I would choose not to define the recovery as ‘successful’. I can no longer play AV stuff through the browser, although sometimes iPlayer behaves and 4OD, but only when using a pop out player window.

I’ve googled the message and quite frankly this appears to be an industry norm, irrespective of whether its, ATI, Nvidia or any other graphics card. Sadly, it appears to be accepted as the norm by the mass of affected users all over the world. There appears to be no one specific cure.

Has a feel of compatibility bolx to me, but clearly I know very little as proven by the tray thing earlier. I wonder if selecting a new bit of hardware for an oldish PC (about 5yrs) is a bit like trying to find the right saddle???

I’m not techy, so I’ve listed the bits of info that might be relevant below:

Packard Bell
Vista Home Premium
Windows
Service Pack 2
AMD Athlon 64 x 2 Dual Core 4200+ 2.2Ghz
RAM 1Gb
32-bit OS
ATI Radeon HD5400 Series

Many thanks indeed.

slackalice

Friday afternoon bump 🙂

Which video card was in there originally?

Thanks Drac, Nvidia I believe. As to which one, I have no idea.

Possibly conflict then as they use 2 different drivers.

CCleaner will make sure it’s gone, I’d remove any Nvidia ones left behind and do a reboot. Once rebooted I’d uninstall ATI drivers and reboot, once done then download the latest ATI drivers and install those and reboot.

Hi, have you updated Adobe Flash player? This is known to cause problems within firefox.
This link may also help

There is a specific Nvidia removal tool on their site, IIRC. Worth checking in Control Panel to see if there’s anything Nvidia-y to uninstall first though.

+1 for making sure you’ve got the latest drivers. If it’s just video playback which is problematic I’d get the latest version of Flash on there too (which is a good idea anyway, old versions of Flash are evil).

Try a different web browser?

I’ve ended up using a XP driver with Win7 & forcing the driver in (when it says “this is the driver your looking for”, just tell it to use it anyways), as the ATI win 7 driver just wouldn’t work.
Might be worth a try…

PS: I would advocate using the latest drivers from ATI, but they seem to be the most useless crap available for ‘older’ cards. Get an Nvidia card next time 😉

I’d suggest Flash as the likely culprit too – I was getting a similar problem (though not as severe) until the most recent Flash update. Making sure you have the latest display driver would be no bad thing though.

As an aside,

Stop putting yourself down. You call yourself a “non-techy” but if everyone wrote meaningful problem descriptions like yours my life would be a hell of a lot easier. The non-techy questions are more like “my computer isnt working its a black one help plz URGENT!!!”

Good suggestion with Flash too.

I wouldn’t advise the windows XP drivers on 7 myself.

he’s actually using vista not 7, but it was the only way I could get my card to work with 7… I tried every driver I could get my hands on & it simply wouldn’t work until I forced the XP one in & it’s been stable for the last year.

No it not good practise but as I say, I found ATI drivers to be next to useless, unless you have the latest all singing and dancing card.

Oh people, thank you. Lots of good looking info here. 😀

I did forget to mention that the Flash Plug-In routinely crashes. The version currently installed is: 11.3 r300 – last update 23/06/12.

I will indeed check to see if there is some Nvidia stuff left on, good thinking – I assumed the LPCS would have done an uninstall. 😳

ATI frequently ask me to update with their latest driver – which I do, by going through the whole tedious process of download, uninstall old driver, reboot, install new driver – yadda yadda. Makes no difference to video playback.

Cheers cougar – point well made and taken in the way intended, I appreciate your candour 😀

Vanman – great link, I’ll use some time to go through it.

I presume this will be a change-one-thing-at-a-time scenario, so I become aware as to what the issue is. I may be some time….

Thank you!

I had a similar problem with a XFX HD5700 card, always crashing with the display drivers now working issue, using both generic windows and multiple versions of catalyst drivers. eventually got it replaced with another card after it had been back under warranty 3 times, no issues since.

If you can put another card in, say Nvidia to verify that nothing else is wrong with your system, sounds like your card maybe faulty.

Anecdotally,

I’ve found the Flash plugin used by Firefox to be a singularly crap piece of software. I had stability issues with Firefox for about two years on my laptop, which finally went away when I uninstalled Flash.

I’ve got around this now by only having the Flash player for Internet Explorer installed. When I want to view Flash in a page, I use a Firefox plugin called “IE Tab 2” which adds an option to right-click that lets Firefox re-render the page using the IE engine (complete with Flash).

It’s a bit of faff, but you can add filters so that certain sites you choose will always render in IE, and it makes browsing a bit slicker when you’re not loading embedded nonsense all the time. (It’s also considerably less likely to pick up a drive-by virus)

Oh yeah,

The other thing you can do is not use Flash by default. On YouTube you can opt in to their HTML5 beta programme, where it’ll then render videos without using Flash when possible (which is about half the time).

Here,

http://www.youtube.com/html5/

Update for those interested.

I removed all things Nvidia, to find that I lost Internet! Apparently, this machine has an Nvidia Network Adaptor. I re-installed and hey presto, I have the Interschneck back.

Mebbe it’s the Nvidia network adaptor and ATI card?

Just added the IE Tab 2 thing and will give this a go and then tootle over to Nvidia site for any other removals.

Great procrastination material for when I really need to be doing a quote 😀

I removed all things Nvidia, to find that I lost Internet! Apparently, this machine has an Nvidia Network Adaptor. I re-installed and hey presto, I have the Interschneck back.

Brilliant (-:

Mebbe it’s the Nvidia network adaptor and ATI card?

Unlikely, to be honest. There’s no reason for them to really conflict; even removing the old video drivers is a bit of long shot IMHO.

If you’ve got an Nvidia NIC (network card), it’s likely that the motherboard chipset is Nvidia also. It might not be a bad idea to get these drivers updated. There’s an automatic checker on their website here.

Well the IE Tab2 add on seems to be helping – yay!

Although, not all the vid’s are displaying. Those that I’ve previously tried to watch are not appearing at all on the page.

Thanks for the Nvidia checker, it’s taking an age to initialise so no further on that one as yet.

Your help and advice is much appreciated 😀